If you’ve been putting off optimizing your site for mobile, now is probably a good time to start. Beginning April 21st, Google will begin ranking sites that are mobile-friendly higher than those that are not. While some people have dubbed this shift “Mobilegeddon,” we believe the proper knowledge can make this transition easy for any website.
The search engine giant says the change will result in higher quality results for users and will have a notable effect on mobile searches worldwide, a shift towards favoring mobile that began last year. In addition, Google will begin using more information from index apps when ranking search results for those who are signed in and have these apps installed.
Why is Google making this shift towards mobile? A recent Marketing Magazine study reports that 87% of consumers use a mobile device to conduct web searches on a daily basis. Last year, the number of mobile internet users surpasses those who primarily searched via desktop.
Are you unsure of your own site’s mobile compatibility? One way to check is to use Google’s mobile-friendly testing tool, which match up to real time search results. An even faster way to check is by looking for the mobile-friendly label that Google added last year to all mobile search results. It also pays to check each page of your site on a mobile device to ensure their effectiveness.
This rollout for this new algorithm, which is expected to have a larger impact than either of Google’s Panda and Penguin algorithms, will take around a week to be fully implemented. Google has also taken great pains to stress that this algorithm won’t recognize degrees of mobile-friendliness – it will either categorize your site as mobile-friendly or not.
If you have further questions about Google’s new algorithm, feel free to email us at info@deksia.com or call 616-570-8111.