Mobilegeddon? You might have heard about Google’s upcoming algorithm change (again!) It’s a new name that blogs and articles have been referring it to as — “Mobilegeddon” — coming into effect on April 21st… although they make it more scary than it should be.
So what is this Mobilegeddon?
Google has noted that mobile devices make up 60 per cent of the online traffic to websites – for that reason, Google is working to change their algorithms to adjust website rankings for search results that come up on mobile devices. It does make sense – if you’re going to be searching Google with your phone, you’d want access to websites that you can view on your phone, wouldn’t you?
You can tell if Google has approved a site as being mobile friendly with a small title added to the search results that say “Mobile-Friendly”, giving upfront reassurance to a viewer that they won’t have any issues viewing the site.
What can you do?
You still have time, however – Google officially suggests that you run your site through their own special tools to see what needs to be done so that their bots can correctly rank your site.
There’s their Mobile Friendly Test which lets you know upfront if there’s any issues that you need to adjust, and what your site looks like on a possible mobile device. They even provide you instructions and tips on what you can do to make your site comply to their standards, or just find out more information in general.
If you’re a-ok by their books, you’ll get a happy praise saying that your page is mobile-friendly!
Secondly, if you have your website connected to a Google Webmasters account, you can check to see full details of mobile usability issues across your site, even down to how many pages have each issue.
Don’t forget that being ‘mobile-friendly’ also means having good page performance — making sure that your site loads fast. It’s just as important of a ranking factor!
Here’s a awesome infographic created by Nine Hertz that gives advice on mobile SEO – including information about the three types of mobile websites you could go for; Responsive Web Design (which we completely recommend!), dynamic serving, or separate URL’s.
If you have a website that you’re interested in making mobile friendly – or just want to make the big jump to being a Responsive website, contact our team and we’ll get you started.