Is Your Website Mobile Friendly? Google Panda 4.2
It’s official: When it comes to computing and staying connected, mobile technology has surpassed desktop solutions. In the year 2014, Web traffic via mobile search and apps exceeded Web traffic from desktop computers.Americans Are More Mobile Than Ever
There are still around 2 billion desktop computers in use worldwide; however, this is in contrast to over 5 billion mobile devices (and counting). Going forward, mobile searches are set to continue surpassing those done via a static desktop computer. Nearly 95 percent of U.S. residents with smartphones report using them to search for information related to their local activities, such as shopping or dining out.
Clearly, mobile technology is here to stay and set to render the old-fashioned desktop computer all but obsolete. An increasing number of computer users are favoring portable laptops for their home computing, and smartphones and tablets connected with the cloud are the preferred method of computing for many other users, including millennials.
One of the results of this trend is that mobile devices are the main connector of shoppers to their chosen brands. While 2014 marked the year mobile took over, 2015 is shaping up to be the year that not being mobile-friendly could hurt your brand and business.
Has Your Business Gone Mobile?
The significance of mobile devices in online activity is reflected in search engine behavior. For example, search engines such as Google now include mobile-friendly labels in their search results. Sites that are not mobile-friendly will likely see a drop in traffic as their ads are given less precedence in mobile searches. The search juggernaut has even created a Mobile Guide to help Web designers, marketers and webmasters to optimize their sites for mobile.
Is your website ideal for display on devices such as tablets and smartphones? The Google testing tool can allow you to see how your site behaves via mobile, so that you can fix any issues. Some of the main ways to accomplish this are adding responsive design to your site, optimizing technical setup, and creating an entirely separate mobile version of your website.
Using Google Tools to Assist You
Google’s Mobile Usability Report tool as well as the Mobile-Friendly Testing Tool within Google's webmaster tool suite offer details and ideas about how to optimize an existing website for mobile devices. For example, the Mobile Usability Report identifies Web pages and elements that have issues; some examples of potential problems in websites include the placement of design elements too closely to one another, viewport configuration issues, Flash usage problems and fonts that are too small when they display. Use the Search Traffic tab in Google Webmaster Tools to take advantage of this online assistance.
However, creating a mobile website isn’t the end point; from there, it’s important that search engines are able to crawl to, locate, understand and effectively index your site. The robots.txt file of your site should be findable by search engine bots via HTML markup references. You should also optimize page loading speed and create a mobile sitemap.
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