Why Mobile Friendly Is A Must

Jonesen TeamIndustry Insights

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It’s official:

“More Google searches take place on mobile devices than on computers in 10 countries including the US and Japan.”
-Google

What does this mean for you? It means that if you are mobile friendly, you are getting noticed by more people. If you’re not mobile friendly, it means that you’re missing out on the majority of traffic on the internet.

That means fewer visitors, lower conversion, and it means you’re losing sales.

Targeting older generations who don’t generally use smartphones? It doesn’t matter. If your site isn’t easy to use on a cell phone or a tablet, people will leave your site, or even ignore it. Eventually, Google will notice that smartphone users (a lot of people) don’t want to be on your site, and even your desktop searches will suffer.

On April 21st of 2015, Google rolled out a new algorithm to determine whether a page is mobile friendly or not. While you will get a boost in search ranking if your site is up to their new standards, the effects of missing the mark can hurt your traffic regardless of whether the search was on a desktop computer, smartphone, or tablet.

Can you access your site from a smart phone? Awesome. But that doesn’t mean it’s mobile friendly. I have access to my mother-in-law’s house, but there’s no guarantee that she’ll be friendly when I get there.

As we mentioned in this particular change, you either have a mobile friendly page or not. It is based on the criteria we mentioned earlier, which are small font sizes, your tap targets/links to your buttons are too close together, readable content and your viewpoint. So if you have all of those and your site is mobile friendly then you benefit from the ranking change.”
-Mary (Google’s Webmasters Team)

Mary lists a few criteria, but there are actually over 200 things Google’s crawler looks for to determine whether your site is mobile friendly or not.

It’s also a pass-fail test.

If your links are too close together, you don’t pass. If you have small font sizes, you fail. It’s not fair, but with the monopoly on search traffic, Google calls the shots. Play our game, or fight with hundreds of millions of companies for the attention of 6% of the world’s search traffic.

Suffice to say, it’s worth checking if your site makes the cut. You can use Google’s own Mobile-Friendly test by entering your website’s address at this site: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/

Did you come up negative? No worries. Hit us up so we can help you get back in front of the majority of the world.

Sources:
http://adwords.blogspot.com/2015/05/building-for-next-moment.html
http://searchengineland.com/library/google/google-mobile-friendly-update

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