Jay Leonard
If your company website is not already mobile-ready then you’ve already lost out on customers. When a mobile user comes across a website that isn’t mobile friendly it is a very frustrating experience and they will very often leave your website and go to your competitor, never to return.
Some businesses have been ok with this… “My customers aren’t viewing our website from their phone” — “Our website is just a brochure so it doesn’t have to be viewable on mobile”
But now, Google has put there foot down, essentially telling businesses that there website should indeed be mobile friendly. Google is making some changes that will negatively impact any website that is not mobile-ready.
What is changing?
Mobile-friendliness has been a factor in Google search for several years now but we can’t tell how much if affects results, however, Google has announced that mobile-friendliness will now be more heavily weighed as a ranking signal.
On February 26, 2015, Google wrote: “This change will affect mobile searches in all languages worldwide and will have a significant impact in our search results.”
The change is set to start on April 21, 2015, and will take perhaps up to week to ‘roll out’ across all searches. The change will affect search results done from mobile devices.
Why the change?
60+% of all Google searches are now done from a mobile device. Because they want their search results to return the best websites, why would they send a mobile user to a website that isn’t mobile friendly?
When mobile users try to access websites that are not mobile-ready, it’s pretty much a waste of time and the user is most likely going to get frustrated. It is Google’s job to make sure that doesn’t happen when they are providing the search results.
So.. how will this affect your business?
If your site is not mobile-ready: You’re going to rank lower in mobile searches and will thus see a decrease in the amount of search engine traffic to your website.
If your site is already mobile-ready: You may experience an increase in rankings/traffic — especially when you’re in an industry where some (or most) of your competitors do not have a mobile friendly website.
What should you do?
- Make sure your website is mobile-ready. It’s super easy to tell, Google has a free tool to check your website:
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/You can tell within a minute whether or not your site is considered mobile friendly or not. - If your website is not mobile-ready you really need to change that. Over the past several years a mobile-friendly site has become the standard. If you’re still behind this trend then it’s most likely time for a new website anyways.If your website is not mobile friendly your business is going to be negatively affected after this new Google update rolls out, but once you make the fix it’ll be easy to regain your rankings/traffic.
Having a website that is optimized for mobile viewing is critical. It shows your mobile users that you care about them and now it is also going to bring you more traffic (lets face it, not every website is going to go mobile-friendly, so take advantage!).
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This article was written for Business 2 Community by Jay Leonard.
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