Mobile, mobile, mobile. It sounds like a buzzword nowadays. Some thought mobile sites were a fad or sales gimmick to upsell your existing website, but the reality is that mobile phones are actually the largest and most widely used devices by consumers by far – definitely not a fad.
In 2015, Google confirmed that more Google searches took place on mobile devices than on desktop computers in 10 countries, including the US. This has continued to grow at a steady, linear rate ever since then. Almost all of our clients, whether they receive organic, referral or paid traffic, are seeing mobile continue to dwarf desktop traffic as time goes on.
If You Have a Website, it Should be Mobile-Friendly.
The first mobile web design update to affect SEO rankings was announced on February 26, 2015 and quickly became known as “Mobilegeddon” because of the impact it would have in the search engine results pages (SERPS). Once the update was rolled out on April 22, 2015, if your site wasn’t mobile-friendly, you were getting demoted in the results. However, websites that were mobile-friendly or responsive had a ‘mobile-friendly’ label next to them in the search results and eventually received an additional rankings boost.
For the most part, large, well-ranking retailers and advertisers didn’t see a large shift in their rankings because they had already made the requisite updates to their website. However, small to mid-range companies saw significantly larger shifts in the rankings and quickly scrambled to redesign websites to obtain the mobile-friendly rewards.
More Mobile-Friendliness
The second mobile-friendly update was announced on Wednesday March 16, 2016 and rolled out May 12, 2016. This update to the “Mobilegeddon” algorithm further increased ranking strength signals for mobile-friendly sites and rewarded those who adapted to the increasingly dominant mobile segment.
Is My Website Mobile-Friendly?
You can check to see if your website design is already mobile-friendly by plugging your website URL into this mobile-friendly test tool.
If your website is not mobile-friendly, reach out to Deep Footprint to discuss how a redesign, responsive retrofit or new, custom website can help you meet Google’s mobile-friendly criteria – we’ve helped plenty of existing clients and new clients accomplish this task over the last few years and would be happy to talk through recommendations and requirements for your specific site.
