Today is the official roll out of the Google mobile-friendly update. This means that mobile-friendly websites will get a boost in ranking while non-mobile-friendly sites will be forced to either become mobile-friendly or be dropped further down in the search engine results. According to Google’s Webmaster Central Blog, the boost in ranking will only be on searches performed on mobile devices, namely smartphones. Smart Insights reports that the mobile use for 2015 is very significant. Websites that are not mobile-friendly are set to lose a lot of traffic as most Internet users access the Web using smartphones of varied sizes. As many as 80% of Internet users use smartphones to access the Internet, according to Smart Insights.

 

 

What is a Mobile-Friendly Website

According to Google, a mobile-friendly website is one that, when accessed via a mobile device such as a smartphone, has readable text without requiring the user to zoom or tap the device to increase font size, linked (i.e. tappable) targets are spaced appropriately, and there is no need to scroll horizontally in order to view the entire page. In other words, the website pages must be nicely fitted onto whatever size of screen the user’s mobile device incorporates.

If you are wondering whether Google considers your website as mobile-friendly, you can use this mobile-friendly test page set up by Google.

Should SearchOps Clients Be Concerned

No. For the past 4 years, SearchOps and the parent company, TCK Media Group, has employed responsive Web design exclusively in all of our client work. Our websites feature pages that adjust to the size of any screen, from large desktops to small smartphones, while maintaining easy-to-read text and properly aligned images. If your site was built before then, please get in touch with us.

Only One Piece of the Puzzle

It is important to note, however, that mobile-friendly pages is just one signal out of many that Google uses to rank websites. Content is still the main driving force behind high ranking. Google makes this clear in their blog post, stating:

The intent of the search query is still a very strong signal — so even if a page with high quality content is not mobile-friendly, it could still rank high if it has great content for the query.

The full impact of the changes in the Google mobile-friendly update of the search giant’s algorithm will be seen after the roll out is complete.

For more info, you can check out the FAQ page that Google set up for this update.