Guest blog by Jeremy Nelson-Smith, Internet Marketing Expert
From today, 21st April 2015, Google will start factoring in ‘mobile friendliness’ to its search results.
This means that sooner rather than later after today web pages that are not considered ‘mobile friendly’ by Google may well see their ranking positions change for the worse.
So why this major push from Google to ‘encourage’ website owners to address their ‘mobile friendliness’?
Well, not surprisingly it’s all to do with the continuing growth in the use of mobile devices, that’s primarily smartphones and tablets, to search for information and goods and services on the Internet. If you’ve looked at your visitor data lately then you’ll almost certainly have noticed that sessions from visitors using mobile devices have steadily increased over the past 12 months or so.
Google wants a positive mobile experience
What Google wants when someone visits a web page using a mobile device is for that person to have the same positive user experience that they would get from using a laptop or desktop computer. That means that Google does not want them to see text that is too small to easily read on a smartphone screen, links that are too small to use and page layouts that require excessive and difficult scrolling. It does not want to see Flash content either!
How can I check if my site is Google “Mobile Friendly”?
Google has made it very easy to check if your website passes their ‘mobile friendly test’.
Simply go to the Google Mobile-Friendly Test and input your URL. A few seconds later you’ll get either this (hopefully!):
or this (groan):
What to do if you’re fail the test…
If you get the red flag on the test then the first thing you should do is contact your web developer and discuss the options and cost for doing what’s necessary to pass.
Google does provide a link on the right of the Test page for you to find out how to fix things (if you use WordPress, for example) but unless you’re sure of what you’re doing then I strongly advise you to leave it to your developer to sort out.
Bite the bullet, get it done and you rest assured that those precious ranking positions that you worked so hard to achieve won’t be compromised.
One last word of advice – don’t delay, just get on with it!