Importance of Being Mobile-Friendly

03/14/2017 0 Comment(s)

Mobile-Friendly is No Longer Optional

On Google’s Webmaster Central Blog, the search engine announced they are continuing in their efforts to adapt the algorithms to the way people use the internet. Since more and more people search the internet on mobile devices, Google is “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.”

What Does "Mobile Friendly" Mean?

Mobile-friendly means your site is easy to read and navigateon a mobile device. Just because you can see a desktop website on a mobile phone, doesn’t mean it is mobile-friendly. A mobile site is actually designed for small screens and has the needs of mobile users top of mind. Mobile-friendly sites load quickly, require very little scrolling and are easy to use. Not all features of your desktop website maybe available on a mobile site.

How to Take Advantage of the Google Rankings Boost for Mobile Friendliness?

You need to first find out if your site is mobile-friendly. If it is, you have nothing to worry about and it is business as normal. If on the other hand, your site is not optimized for mobile devices, you need to get busy and fast.

If you don’t know whether you have a mobile optimized site, Google will tell you. Take a look at your mobile phone. Pull up a Google search page and search for your site name (without the .com, .net, .biz, etc.). Google adds what it calls mobile-friendly labels to search results. They may look similar to the image to your right.

If you searched for "pure-ecommerce" on your mobile phone, you would see something similar to the image on your left.

To be eligible for amobile-friendly label, a website must meet the following criteria as detectedby Googlebot:

• Avoids software that is not common on mobile devices, like Flash
• Uses text that is readable without zooming
• Sizes content to the screen so users don't have to scroll horizontally or zoom
• Places links far enough apart so that the correct one can be easily tapped

Now you know if you have a mobile friendly site or not. If there is no label, you can stop reading and start getting one. If you have the label, we suggest going a step further to be sure it is performing well:

 

To see how well your website works on mobile devices, you can go to Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test Page.

All you need to do is copy your website URL and paste it into the box. Click Analyze. If you get a message saying, “Awesome! This Site is Mobile-Friendly, you are done! Relax and enjoy.

If however, you get a message saying, “Not mobile-friendly” you have work to do.

Make Your Site Mobile-Friendly

Pure-Ecommerce knows how to make your site mobile friendly. Simply submit a ticket to our technical team for a quote or ideas.

The Next Steps

While Google has been kind and given us all sufficient warning of this update, they don’t claim to tell us everything about it. They do however, give us tools to identify whether we’re on the right track or not. Use your Google Webmaster Tools and create a Mobile Usability Report. This tool analyzes many aspects of your mobile site and will help you understand how it reacts to different mobile devices.

To check out the mobile usability of your site, log into your Google Webmaster Tools account. Select SearchTraffic > Mobile Usability.

If it says there are no mobile usability errors detected then everything is great and you’re good to go. If on the other hand, it reports errors, then you will need to takeaction to correct them.

Finally, once you have your mobile-friendly website and everything is good with no usability errors you will want to resubmit your site map to Google to be extra sure they know you’ve updated and now are mobile friendly. To resubmit your sitemap, log into your Webmaster Tools account. Select Optimization> Sitemaps. Click on the /sitemap.xml file and then click thered, resubmit button.

For More Information:

Google Developers Mobile SEO Guide

Principles of Mobile Site Design: Delight Users and Drive Conversions

 

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