If you’ve always wanted to enhance your website to make it mobile friendly, we suggest moving that task to the top of your to-do list. That’s because Google announced recently that it will place greater emphasis on mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal in search starting April 21, 2015.
Google’s not pulling any punches about what this could mean for your local or enterprise business. All mobile searches in all languages will be affected and the new changes “will have a significant impact in our search results,” Google says. “Consequently, users will find it easier to get relevant, high quality search results that are optimized for their devices.”
In other words, Google is looking out for its user base (searchers) and businesses need to get on the mobile bus. If you don’t, your business’s search results performance will take a slide into obscurity.
This isn’t a surprising move, of course. With the rapid rise of phones and tablets in everyday web searching, creating a mobile-friendly website for customers (and potential customers!) is a no-brainer. But some business owners balk at this needed task for various reasons. They may believe moving to a mobile-friendly site is:
- Time consuming
- Expensive
- Confusing
We first recommend starting with Google’s free Mobile Friendly Test. This tool quickly analyzes your site. If it’s not mobile friendly, Google suggests different solutions depending on your skill level in coding; what platform you used to create the site (such as WordPress); and whether or not someone else built the site for your organization.
If you hired an agency or web building firm to build your website, give them a call today and set up a meeting to talk about making your site mobile friendly. If you are a do-it-yourselfer, many website products such as Squarespace have baked-in mobile responsive websites. For ecommerce, sites such as Shopify create mobile-friendly sites for your online store.
The clock is ticking on this change, so take steps today to make your website visitors have the best mobile optimized experience they can. If you’ve been waiting for a “good reason” to make your site mobile friendly, that reason has arrived. Don’t fall down in search results for something so preventable and (in most cases), a fairly easy fix. Good luck and go mobile!
Olga is a Senior Manager in Marketing and Sales Operations.
