What You Need to Know About Google’s New Mobile-Friendly Website Requirements
Google has been making headlines lately for their newest update that has a lot of businesses scrambling. Here’s why: Tuesday, April 21st marks the date when Google is adopting a mobile-friendly format, and any business page that has not embraced the mobile formatting will not only lose points in their search engine optimization ranking, but their pages will not be visible on a mobile device. This is obviously bad news for these pages because the majority of Internet searches are done on a mobile device. You may be wondering, what constitutes a mobile-friendly site? Google announced that these sites are those with large text, easy-to-click links, or with responsive design (aka pages with layouts that adapt to the screen they are being viewed on–mobile, laptop, tablet, etc.).
Before the panic strikes, Google has released a mobile-friendly test (also available in an app) so you can enter your business URL and see if it is mobile-friendly (and if not, measures to take to fix the site).
Test your website here: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/
The remaining question you’re left with is probably “why?” Taking a look at a few statistics, anywhere from a low 30% to as high as 70% of organic traffic originates from mobile devices. With this in mind, the goal of this update is believed to be that making these changes will provide a better mobile experience for searchers and give people what they want with the convenience they desire.
This is definitely something to be on the lookout for, not only as a business but as a consumer.
