A major update from Google is about to take effect this month that has a huge impact on mobile searches. If your website isn’t mobile-friendly by April 21, 2015 your site will not be shown in results from mobile searches. This means that you need to expect not to receive any mobile traffic from Google at all. Estimates are that websites that are not mobile-friendly will lose an average of 30% traffic. To test if your website is or isn’t mobile-friendly you can use this tool from Google or just do a Google search for your website. Look for the ‘mobile-friendly’ tag like this one:
A tag or label now displays prominently at the start of a listing so the person searching will know that there are mobile friendly options to look at. It’s more than likely the mobile searches will opt for these websites first.
A page is eligible for the “mobile-friendly” label if it meets the following criteria as detected by Googlebot:
- Avoids software that is not common on mobile devices, like Flash.
- Uses text that is readable without zooming.
- Sizes content to the screen so users don’t have to scroll horizontally or zoom.
- Places links far enough apart so that the correct one can be easily tapped.
If your current website isn’t mobile-friendly, ask us what’s involved in bringing it up to the new standard.