Make no mistake about it, the future of search will be strongly tied to mobile activity. Google is pushing to ensure modern websites embrace mobile friendliness or they risk suffering the search ranking consequences.
Earlier this year, Google announced it would be introducing mobile-friendliness as a search ranking signal. The announcement was dubbed “Mobilegeddon” because of the anticipated widespread search implications for websites that were not optimized for mobile. While the company made some changes to mobile search results, many experts and critics have felt that the fear was exaggerated as we haven’t seen much impact on website traffic. Until now?
Last week, Google announced that beginning in May 2016, mobile-friendliness will have a stronger impact on website search results. The search engine giant’s motivation for the change is “to help users find even more pages that are relevant and mobile-friendly.” Amit Singhal, Google’s former VP of Search, acknowledged that the summer of 2015 was the first time more Google searches were completed on mobile devices than desktop computers.
Following May’s algorithm update, if you haven’t updated your website to meet Google’s mobile-friendliness standards, your website’s rankings may drop in the mobile search view as Google shows preference to mobile-friendly sites. The new update is an evolution of the current algorithm. The same criteria and filters will simply be given more power as an overall ranking factor. Note: This update is said to affect smartphones only –tablet searches are not affected at this time.
Now is the time to update your website to be mobile-friendly. A mobile optimized website will ensure your site doesn’t see a negative impact from this algorithm update and will result in a better user experience for mobile website visitors. If you’d like to know how mobile-friendly your site is take the provided by Google and contact Mambo if your website needs a refresh to meet Google’s new requirements.
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