The Google Mobile Friendly Update

Is Your Site Mobile Friendly?

The Google Mobile Friendly Update launched April 21st. This update will potentially give a ranking boost to mobile-friendly pages in Google’s mobile search results.  Now searchers can more easily find high-quality and relevant results where text is readable without tapping or zooming, tap targets are spaced appropriately, and the page avoids unplayable content or horizontal scrolling.
 
These 2 quotes pulled from Forbes magazine hit the nail on the head for business owners:
 

“You should continually invest in how you interact with your consumers in exactly the same way you no doubt continually train your staff to interact optimally with your customers.”
– Jono Alderson, Forbes Magazine

“It’s not rocket science. Bite the bullet, ditch your unresponsive site or your ‘m.’ subdomain and embrace a blend of responsive, reactive, adaptive content and templates. Do it now, or be displaced by competitors who got there – and stopped frustrating their consumers – years ago.”
– Kaspar Szymanski, former senior member of the Google Webspam team

 
If your site isn’t mobile friendly, have a look the following points.  With more and more business being done on-the-go it just makes sense to have a responsive website to better serve your smartphone community.
 

5 mobile-friendly action points

Here are some ‘first steps’ to take when responding to Google’s latest mobile friendly algorithm update, whether a business employs their own in-house SEO team or outsources their SEO:
 

1. The algorithm roll out affects only search rankings on mobile devices and applies to individual pages, not entire websites, so make sure your most important pages are indexed as mobile friendly as soon as possible.
2. Check if your site is already considered mobile friendly by Google – you should see the mobile friendly label in the mobile search results or use Google’s mobile friendly test to check. (There may be a delay in Google identifying mobile friendly web pages on your site though)
3. Cross check Google’s ‘top seven mistakes webmasters make when going mobile friendly’ blog post to see if you’re guilty!
4. Check the status of your entire site through the Mobile Usability report in Webmaster Tools that identifies those pages on your site suffering from severe usability problems for mobile visitors.
5. Having made the changes, instruct Google’s spiders to crawl your site sooner than they might have otherwise done by using Google’s Fetch as Google function in Webmaster tools.

 
Contact us if you need some assistance or advise.
 
Google