Is your website mobile friendly? Why should you care?
If you are watching your website analytics (and you should be!), you have probably seen an upward curve on the number of visitors who come to your site on a mobile device. A few years ago, most sites would see few, if any, visits from someone using a mobile device. Today, that has changed dramatically. While most of my clients are receiving approximately 25 – 30% of visits from people who are mobile, some of my clients get more than half (50%+) of their traffic from a mobile visitor.
Studies have shown that most mobile visitors are frustrated when trying to navigate a non-mobile friendly website. Google agrees. So whether you personally never access a website using a mobile device, or your mobile screen is very large and accommodating, or you prefer viewing the full site on your mobile device, those points are all moot if you want your website to rank on Page 1 of Google.
You can test your site to see if Google finds it mobile friendly. Your Webmaster tools should already give you that information. If you don’t have access to that, go to Google’s test page https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/ and enter your website URL. This tool will only tell you if that particular tested page is mobile friendly, so be sure to test a variety of your site pages. Just because your homepage is mobile friendly doesn’t mean your blog is.
What do you mean, penalize? If your site is not mobile friendly, Google will penalize it by not allowing it to rank on Page 1 of their mobile Search Results. It’s difficult to say if they will bounce it to Page 2, Page 3, or lower. Certainly a lot depends on how mobile friendly your competitors are. This will not impact your desktop Search Results, so if you are on Page 1 when someone searches using a non-mobile device, you will not be penalized. However, with more and more searches being performed from a phone, it doesn’t make sense to ignore this market.
It didn’t make sense before the Google update to have a non-mobile friendly website. But now, you’ll be shooting your business in the foot.
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