April 21 is D-Day! The day that Google will start using mobile-friendly compliance as a ranking factor in search.
Are you ready?
Do you know how well your site performs on mobile?
Two simple and quick tests that you can take are:
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/
https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/
Have you checked Google Webmaster Tools to see if you have any mobile usability issues?
If the results of these two simple tests are poor, what does that mean for you, when April 21 comes around?
Should you panic? Well, according to Zineb (a Google employee), she says that the April 21 mobile roll-out will have a bigger impact on search results than the Penguin and Panda algorithms ever did.
In other words, this is going to have a huge impact on mobile search results!
For the teams at The Foundry, we’ve always put mobile first. Every web site we design and build is always responsive - and that’s been the case for the last three years.
Mobile compliance for us is no longer optional. The same thing should most likely apply to you, too. Whether you have an established site or a recently revamped site, you probably need to ensure that you are mobile compliant… or run the risk of losing that very important commodity called web site traffic.
Now, at SMX in the US, Google did state that, upon roll-out, new mobile ranking factors would be determined on a page-by-page basis; and not just site-wide.
This means that other non-mobile-friendly pages on a site can’t hurt those pages that are mobile-friendly, when Google begins using mobile-friendliness as a ranking factor. This is good news for big sites, as it means that an iterative approach can be adopted.
Your crawl budget is essential to your optimisation and, in Google Webmaster Tools, you will be notified of the pages on your site that Google believes do not comply. If those pages are subsequently optimised and made mobile-friendly, the next time Googlebot crawls them and determines that they are indeed mobile-friendly, they will get a boost from the mobile ranking signal.
Google has predicted that mobile search will, of course, at some stage, probably overtake desktop search. Again, in your Google Analytics, you can drill down and see what percentage split of traffic you are generating from both desktop and mobile. You might even get a surprise.
Never more so than right now, making your site mobile-friendly is necessary for any site, and it’s a good long-term investment, even if it doesn’t affect your short-term traffic. Think long-term! Google has made a point of saying that it wants websites to be friendly and easy to browse for users on mobile devices, calling this “very important.” They are also hoping to see online forms marked-up with the ‘autocomplete’ attribute, in the future. Not a particularly difficult thing to instigate, once you’re aware of it.
http://googlewebmastercentral....
Google are making it very clear where they stand from a mobile perspective, and here’s why:
If you rely on Google for traffic to your site - and the question is, who doesn’t? - then you should make sure that you’re moving your site developments in the appropriate direction.
We at The Foundry hope that this information is useful to you. If you are in any way worried about the impending date, your website’s performance on desktop and mobile, or your crawl budget, then just make contact and we can have a chat.
Indeed, if you’re perhaps concerned about your overall share of voice online, website visibility, ranking, conversions or optimisation, just call or email us, and let’s start a conversation about our favourite Foundry mantra and mission statement: selling today, building brands for tomorrow.
On April 1st there will be many bad jokes - just make sure the 21st doesn't take away your sense of humour.
