Having a mobile ready responsive website is more important than ever before. We have said it twice now and we can not stress it enough. I am sure you are asking yourself why is it so important. The short answer beyond all the technical mumbo jumbo is that on April 21st Google is going to be penalizing sites that aren’t mobile ready.
What Is Being Mobile Ready?
Mobile ready websites are sites that have the ability to be easily viewed on cell phones and tablets. They (the devices) have smaller screens so viewing a website designed for a desktop browser can be difficult to view or interact with links on them. Due to this issue with mobile devices, responsive or mobile ready recently became the way to design a website so it can be viewed on almost any device.
Why is it Important?
Statistics show that over 80% of people who surf the internet have a smartphone and many are using them to surf the internet. This has caused Google to decide to make a shift in it’s search algorithm (on its mobile search tool) to make sites not mobile ready not rank as well on it’s search engine. Put in layman’s terms if your competition has a website that is mobile ready and you do not, if a potential customer browsing using a mobile device searches for your product or service, there is a very good chance that they will be ranking higher on Google then you will be. That means people will find them first and might not go down to your listing if they find what they need with your competitor.
Google announced two notable changes that will affect the rankings of search results for users accessing Google search on mobile devices. It will now take into consideration a site’s mobile-friendliness as one of its ranking signals, and information from indexed mobile applications will also begin to influence ranking for signed-in users who have the app installed on their smartphone.
In it’s announcement Google stated that “As more people use mobile devices to access the internet, our algorithms have to adapt to these usage patterns”.
Is there a solution to this problem?
There are many solutions to the issue. First the best solution would be to have your site completely redesigned using new mobile ready design, with mobile usability in mind when creating content and images that will display well on a small device. If you do not want to go the route of having a new website designed that is mobile ready there are tools out there that can take your current website and make it mobile ready. Some of the tools are more cost effective than others and do a better job than others but in the end the idea is to not completely redesign the site.
Conclusion
At this point time is of the essence and you should contact a professional who can guide you to a solution that will best fit your needs. They will take into account budget, time, design, needs and hopefully get you where you need to be before you lose ground to your competition.