Mobile-friendly Google Guide
Mobile website ranking in Google is now extremely important since over 70% of searches are from mobile devices. Google announced on its blog back in 2015 it will boost the ranking of mobile-friendly websites, when searches are from mobile devices. With over 70% of people checking for websites from their mobile device, Google says it’s about time you stopped tapping, zooming and squinting to find information. It isn’t easy to get on the first page of Google and when Google changes its algorithms we should all pay attention. Although there are other search engines out there, Yahoo, Bing, Ask, etc. by far the greatest number of searches are from Google.
How To Check If Your Website Is Mobile-friendly?
Is your mobile website ranking in Google ok? How do you know. Fortunately for business owners Google has made it easy to check if your page is mobile-friendly by supplying a test page. Here is a link to the test page. Copy your url into the space provided and Google will analyze the results. It only takes a few seconds to find out. You can do the same for all the rest of the pages on your site. This is how our sister company appeared.
If your site is mobile-friendly, it will show like this:
What To Do If Your Website Is Not Mobile-friendly
If you have a site designed in flash or on outdated e-commerce platform you may be in trouble and have to start over again by redesigning your site or getting a web developer to do it for you.
If you have a WordPress site, and designed the site yourself, just go to the themes page and type in “responsive” and all the mobile-friendly free themes will appear. As the list is extensive you won’t have any problem picking one to suit your business. Great premium themes, with all the new features can be found on the Themeforest site.
One word of caution, before installing a new theme, make sure you backup your website data and theme so you do not lose all your information. Once you overwrite your theme, your existing information may look completely different.
We do not suggest you make a theme change on your ‘live’ site. A safer route is to create a subdomain and download a new theme to your sub-domain and re-load your saved pages to your new design. Your existing website will stay safe until you are happy with your new design, which you can then upload to your url. This will then override your old site and you will be up and running with a great new mobile-friendly website which will now rank much better from a mobile device.
Once your mobile-friendly site is finished Google will automatically re-submit to index, but if you want to expedite this process you can re-submit it to Google to improve your Google ranking. Here’s how.
Three Tips for Mobile Website Ranking in Google
- Don’t forget the mobile customer, by leaving them to struggle to see your website. No more pinching, zooming or tapping!
- Don’t implement a separate mobile site on a different domain, sub-domain, or sub-directory from your desktop site.
- Don’t go it alone when re-doing your website. Check out competitive sites or sites from companies you admire such as Kickstarter or AirBNB to see the design features they include. Inspiration can come from many sources.
Don’t Want To Redesign Your Mobile-friendly Website Yourself?
Many business owners are busy and don’t have time to spare for website redesign. A web developer can take on this task for you and it doesn’t have to be expensive. If you would like a quote on a new web design, so that your mobile website ranking in Google scores well, we would be happy to help you.Connect with us for your 1/2 complimentary chat via zoom.