By now, most people know that Google prefers mobile friendly and responsive websites. Google is now taking it a step further by announcing they will start penalising websites that aren’t mobile friendly from 21 April, 2015.
From the end of April, a comparable mobile friendly site will rank higher than a site that isn’t mobile friendly, so if you haven’t tested what your website looks like on your smart phone – now is the time.
“Starting April 21, we will be expanding our use of mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal. This change will affect mobile searches in all languages worldwide and will have a significant impact in our search results. Consequently, users will find it easier to get relevant, high quality search results that are optimised for their devices,” read the announcement on Google’s Webmaster Central blog.
How to find out if your website is mobile friendly
You can use Google’s Mobile-Friendly test to find out if your website is mobile friendly. Simply type in your website’s URL and wait for your results to find out how mobile friendly your website pages are.
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is a big part of internet marketing, so this change to Google’s algorithms will have an impact on how internet marketers, like us, build sites. According to a report from June 2014 by comScore, smartphones and tablets now account for 60% of total digital media time spent (this is a 10% increase from 2013), so this is just another way Google is trying to make their search results more relevant to users.
If your website currently isn’t mobile friendly or you need help determining what should be done in order to improve your search engine rankings, get in touch with us today. Our in-house team of web developers, designers and SEO experts are here to help you stay on top of Google changes (and on top of the search results). Contact us for more information today.