In February 2015 Google made a stunning announcement that contained the following:
“Starting April 21, we will be 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. Consequently, users will find it easier to get relevant, high quality search results that are optimized for their devices.”
Since then business owners have scrambled to update their sites to make them mobile friendly if they were not already often using the Responsive Website Design upgrade approach, rather then just putting in a mobile redirect. But with only a 2% rise in front page rankings on search results being mobile friendly some may have felt that it was a bit of a storm in a teacup. Google uses many ranking factors when indexing web pages, and with mobile ‘friendliness’ being only one of those ranking factors the anticipated update to Google’s algorithms did not have make all that much difference.
There are many other factors including web page usefulness (including domain popularity and web page content) and on page search engine optimisation that are taken into consideration by Google when ranking web pages.
On March 16th Google announced that they would rolling out an update that will increase the effect of their mobile ranking signals. This means that if you have not found the time to update your website to obtain Google’s label as ‘mobile friendly‘ now is the time. There are 3 main points google looks at when deciding whether or not your website is mobile friendly.
These are:
- No zooming in to read the content necessary.
- No horizontal scrolling.
- Links easy to click and not too close together.
To check if you website is mobile friendly visit this site and enter your URL.
If you are looking for a website design company to assist you further in improving your website, or the amount of leads that you get from it, please don’t hesitate to call AIA on 1300 304 640 or email us at info@aiad.com.au.
