Mobile responsive design will now be part of the Google “Search” algorithm starting April 21, 2015. Google will now consider your website’s mobile friendliness when ranking websites…even when you are searching on your PC.
What is mobile responsive? Mobile responsive, or mobile friendly, means your website automatically adjusts so that it may be viewed and navigated on a variety of differently sized screens; pc monitors, laptops, tablets, smartphones, etc.
Why Does Mobile Responsive Matter?
Use of mobile devices to access the Internet continues to increase not only because of the popularity of the mobile devices such as smart phones and tablets, but also because there is a growing percentage of Americans who depend upon smartphones as their sole way to connect to the Internet.
In short, your website needs to be mobile responsive (mobile friendly) as more and more people access the Internet with a mobile device than ever before.
More than half of smartphone owners access information about health or online banking using their mobile device (Pew Research Center American Trends Panel survey, October 3-27, 2014).
Mobile is a Must for Optimization
The concept of mobile-friendliness has been around for awhile. More recently, you may have noticed that your Google search results listed those sites which were “mobile friendly” when searching your phone. As of today, this mobile friendliness becomes a key component to getting and maintaining high organic search rankings.
What Can You Do?
The first thing to do is test your site for its mobile friendliness. Use Google’s Mobile Friendly Test to determine if you even need to worry about this at all!
For those of you who fail, consider Google’s recommendations to creating a mobile site.
For our clients, we have long recommended WordPress.org and Studiopress. All of our design packages include use of mobile responsive themes.
Randy
Randall Wong, M.D.
SEO for Professionals!