Smartphone - Will Mobilegeddon affect your business?

Google began rolling out their latest mobile-friendly algorithm on April 21. It will only affect mobile searches, it’s designed to rank mobile-friendly websites higher in search results – and it’s sent website owners into a panic.

The SEO industry has dubbed it “Mobilegeddon.”

As apocalyptic as it sounds, Mobilegeddon won’t spell the death of your business’s website traffic. But without preparation, your traffic will be affected.

How to Tell if Your Site is Mobile Friendly

Just because your website is viewable on mobile devices – in other words, it doesn’t throw an error message – doesn’t mean that your site is safe from losing search engine ranking now that Mobilegeddon is upon us.

There are two ways to find out if Google is ranking your site as mobile friendly:

  1. Check it on Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test Tool
  2. View your website in Google’s search results on your mobile device. It will have a “mobile-friendly” tag if Google has given its blessing

What Makes a Site Mobile Friendly?

So what constitutes mobile-friendly in the first place? Google looks for these four things:

  1. Your site uses text that is readable without zooming
  2. The content resizes to fit the screen, so users don’t have to scroll horizontally
  3. Your site doesn’t have software that gives mobile devices a hard time (like Flash)
  4. Links are placed far enough apart that they can be tapped easily with a fingertip

Will Your Website Traffic be Affected?

So will Mobilegeddon affect your business website’s ranking in Google’s search results? The short answer is, if your website is not mobile friendly, yes you will probably see a reduction in your search engine ranking on mobile devices.

The good news is that you can fix it – and Google will pick up on the change quickly.

If your site isn’t mobile friendly, call your Web developer. They will either reconfigure your site with responsive Web design, or code it so it serves a different (mobile friendly) version of your site to mobile devices.

Once your site is re-launched with the required mobile-friendly elements, Google’s algorithm will pick up on the change in real time. In other words, you don’t have to wait for Google’s bots to crawl your site – the search engine will see the change immediately.

Your site is either mobile-friendly or it’s not. There’s no “more or less” mobile-friendly ranking. Ensure your site is mobile-friendly and Mobilegeddon won’t affect your search rankings.