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How Friendly is Google's New Mobile Update?
Today is the day Google will begin to roll out a NEW mobile-friendly update for search engine rankings on mobile devices. The new algorithm will put emphasis on whether a website is mobile friendly and improve their ranking in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Page).
This, in theory, should give a more complete search experience for mobile phone users, with higher quality and more relevant search results.
So what does it mean to be mobile friendly?
The best way to explain this is to imagine a user looking at your website on a mobile device, can they easily read your web pages without zooming in and out, are the links and targets spaced appropriately for a user to easily tap on a touchscreen, is there any unplayable content (Flash), any nasty horizontal scrollbars, are the fonts legible, are the images correctly sized, and generally does your website look as good as possible on a mobile device?
There are a couple of ways to make your website mobile-friendly, one is with 100% responsive design and the other is adaptive design. For our own site we have used the adaptive approach by designing a mobile specific theme - this has allowed us to target mobile phone users without loading unnecessary content, for instance our Javascript home-page slider looks great on a desktop computer, but doesn't function quite as well on a mobile device. For the mobile site our main emphasis is on readable content and quick access.
We would recommend all websites to be mobile-friendly, especially if you have a lot of mobile phone visitors to your website. However, it is important to note, Google have stated a mobile-friendly website alone will not mean you'll automatically rank higher than everyone else, it's just one of many important factors/signals to rank search results.
Contact us today and find out how we can build a mobile-friendly website for you!