Are You Mobile Friendly?

Connectica • June 12, 2015 • SEO

digital marketing company

Read Time: 3 minutes

Tips From a Digital Marketing Company – Becoming Mobile Friendly

How does your website do when checked on a Smartphone or tablet? Is it responsive and optimized for mobile users? If not, you might want to consider getting your website more equipped for Smartphone and tablet use, as Google is now penalizing websites for not being mobile friendly enough.

This should offer incentive to ensure your website is modified in order to be as responsive and optimized for mobile use as possible. The goal is to ensure that all users achieve timely results while searching the Internet on their phone. If your website is not responsive then it is best to get a digital marketing company to help convert your website so that you don’t miss out.

Google, the popular search engine that also specializes in cloud computing, software and advertising technologies, introduced a new algorithm to reflect the fact that more people are using the Internet on smaller, more mobile devices. While in the past, Google has already made it easier for users to find mobile-friendly sites, they hope the additional changes that came into effect on April 21, 2015, will increase the functionality even more.

Google will be putting more of an emphasis on the mobile friendliness of a website in its ranking signal, impacting Internet searches in all languages.

The goal of these implementations is to give users more relevant and better search results on their mobile devices. It will mean that Google will no longer recognize or present websites to mobile users that include non-working redirects, 404 pages or Flash videos…moving these websites to a lower ranking.

The new algorithm will detect a website’s mobile friendliness page by page, as opposed to a website-wide detection. This translates to meaning that if not all of your websites pages are optimized for mobile users, they will be analyzed separately. Only the pages that are optimized will be ranked, but at least your entire website will not be penalized.

The new algorithm also runs in real-time, which means that as soon as you have your website optimized for mobile users, the changes will be noticed by Google when it performs its next crawl.

While it might seem like Google is punishing you by forcing you to pay money to have your website redone in order to make it mobile-phone friendly, the changes are actually going to help you reach Smartphone and tablet users more easily and offer them a more positive user experience. This means that your website will be accessible and used by a much greater number of people, as most people don’t venture too far from their phones these days.

In order to help websites get ready for the changes, Google is offering a number of services, including a page that would allow you to see if your site is mobile phone friendly. They also provide guidance for making your website mobile friendly with third party software, the technical information about the new changes, and information on working with someone to improve your website’s functionality for mobile phones.

A quick test that you can perform yourself to check if your site is responsive or not is to simply grab the corner of your screen while you are on your site and drag it to make it bigger and smaller. If all the different components of your site automatically re-arrange themselves so that it is still fully functional and readable on smaller screens this means that your site is responsive. If it doesn’t re-arrange or adjust itself and you find that you can’t use parts of your website properly or read everything that is on the screen without scrolling, then your website is not responsive and this will hugely affect your rankings!

Failure to prepare your website for the implementation of last month’s changes will likely have seen your website drop from Google’s rankings. Having a mobile friendly website definitely gives you an advantage as it allows your site to be accessible to so many more users. While the new Google algorithm might speed up you optimizing your website for mobile users, it will benefit you in the long run.

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