MOBILE FRIENDLINESS RANKING FACTOR: Why You Need to be Mobile-Responsive
MOBILE FRIENDLINESS IS NOW A THING — It is common knowledge to most marketers that Last April 2015, Google search has expanded its mobile friendliness algorithm known as “Mobilegeddon”. This update from Google has marked the beginning of a shift of focus from desktop to mobile searches and has affected a lot of websites that are not mobile-responsive. Some of the affected may have experienced a decline in their Google SERP ranking or even to the volume of their monthly traffic.
What is Mobile Friendliness?
There are 75.4 million unique mobile users in the Philippines, comprising 74% of the nation’s population. Almost everyone these days considers themselves to be “tech-savvy” with the advent of the internet allowing even the simplest devices to do an amazing amount of tasks.
Let’s face it, with a market as large as that, you probably want your brand to be etched on the consciousness of these users. This is exactly why it’s time for your website to go mobile.
Opting for a mobile-responsive website or the mobile friendliness of your website enables it to be sent instantly dynamic as it fits symmetrically on any screen size, minimizing usability issues such as links that are not clickable, images taking forever to appear, scrolling problems and lagging issues.
Simply put – a mobile-responsive website enhances user experience.
Want to know how to make your website friendly? Say hi to one of our account executives, or leave us a message on our contact form.
Mobile version vs Mobile-Responsive
On the off-chance that you live under a rock, you might probably be more familiar with the term “mobile version”.
Mobile version is different from mobile-responsive. The former means developing a version of your website customized for mobile users and uses a separate URL commonly beginning with “m” (such as m.facebook.com). It’s like having two unique websites with one dedicated to desktops and another for mobile devices.
The latter, on the other hand, automatically resizes the content of your website based on user device allowing for optimum user experience.
Post-Mobilegeddon Updates
Aside from the ‘mobilegeddon’ released on 2015, other updates released were Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), which launched in February 2016, and ‘mobilefirst indexing’, which Google has been working on for quite a while now.
The AMP or the Accelerated Mobile Page Project is an open source initiative of Google launched in October 2015. This update works towards increasing the performance of the mobile web, loading web pages instantly, even with rich content or ads.
AMP is not a mobile ranking factor, however, its objective is to improve the functions of mobile websites with stripped-down versions of web pages. This enables users to read and scan your content with ease, improving your website’s traffic and in time, improving your SERP ranking. Google AMP lets publishers focus on great content while depending on other components like image carousels and social plugins for high performance and great user experience.
Another recent update is mobilefirst indexing. Google has been adjusting their algorithms to primarily use mobile versions of website content to rank pages, understand its structured data, and show snippets from those pages on their SERPs. Here are some of the recommendations of google about dealing with the mobilefirst indexing update:
- Stay on your responsive site or dynamic serving site on desktop and mobile version;
- If the two versions of your website’s primary content are different, you should make your structured data uniform, make your mobile website crawlable, and maintain canonical links unchanged;
- Verify your desktop and mobile website versions against Google Search Console;
- Launch new mobile sites only when they’re ready, to avoid any unwanted effects on your desktop sites that may arise from faulty mobile ones.
Businesses that rely heavily on traffic and leads coming from online sources should prepare to change extensively, otherwise, their potential sales will be flushed down the drain. Below are the advantages of making your website mobile-responsive:
Know more about the benefits of a mobile-responsive website or its mobile friendliness by calling our sales executives or by sending us a message through this LINK.
It strengthens your website’s optimization.
With Google recently releasing an algorithm specifically targeting websites that aren’t mobile-responsive yet, now would be the best time to do so. Having a mobile-responsive site brings more traffic to your website which then opens doors to increase sales and revenue. A great search rank on desktop and mobile would be beneficial for your business because that’s brand awareness reaching your market through multiple channels.
It saves you time and money.
With a mobile-responsive website, you can focus your resources instead in building and creating new campaigns and content instead of developing a separate website for mobile devices.
It keeps you ahead of your competition.
There are a lot of businesses who have yet to invest in this new kind of technology because, well, it’s new; and new is a mystery few have the courage to explore.
Going mobile-responsive automatically puts you ahead of the curve because you’re already building your rank up while others are still flirting with the idea.
It provides an optimum user experience for your consumers.
With smartphones and tablets continuously increasing in terms of usage, giving your market the ability to browse through your site with ease is one step to earning their trust. Because everything is organized and made faster, potential clients are more likely to explore your website than leave it the moment they see the home page. Your site will have perfectly scaled images and readable texts so there’s no reason to not give it a chance.
Sources:
- Straightarrow.com.ph
- Webmaster.googleblog.com