Get Mobile-Friendly Before Google’s Mobile Search Update

Your last chance is until April 21, 2015 to make your, or your client’s website responsive if they have not been designed that way until now.

If your sites aren’t mobile friendly, you could now bid goodbye to Google search engine rankings, and be responsible for the rankings of your websites going drastically down in Google Search.

If you think that we are just fooling around, it’s not a fact. Although, the most uncertain thing in the search industry is Google, there are some heavy hints that the search giant has left for us about the upcoming update. If you thought that Google Panda update & Penguin were bad, you still need to see what could be worse than that as Google has already sent us a warning, providing the tools, and creating hype about the update. Google feels that the new update is going to be ground shattering.

Statements from Google

Back in February, Google issued a clear statement written in plain English about how they intended to penalize all those websites that did not seem to be mobile-friendly.

From April 21, they have stated that they will be expanding their consideration of mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal. They also stated that this will affect mobile searches in all languages worldwide and will have a significant impact on the search results.

You may have been aware about this and probably saw this coming. But we all have so many other tasks that you wouldn’t have got the time to update your site to comply with the new update. And who knows, what exactly is Google going to do with the mobile-friendly sites in order to rank them.

The Reason For This Major Change

You may love Google, or hate it, however, it is very consistent with its updates. It is continually stressing on the fact that it wants to give the best user experience to the searchers. It strives to provide the web users with the most relevant, and useful content in response to their entered search terms.

Responding to the rise in the users of the Internet on mobile devices, Google has now decided to release the update that lays greater emphasis on the users who could navigate easily using a mobile device.

If you go by the demonstrated facts of Mitul Gandhi from SEO Clarity in SMX West Conference, 30% of organic traffic is originating from mobile devices, and this data is valid across a range of industries. Even if we leave aside these statistics, we know for sure that mobile search is increasing with each passing day, and thus, Google’s decision to promote mobile-friendly sites seems to be rational.

How Could You Prepare Your Website For This Mobile Update?

What are the things that you could do to prepare your website for this Google mobile update? We are going to look at a few things that will help you create a great mobile-friendly website, helping you in beating yet another Google penalty.

1)  Use mobile-friendly plugins to convert the page:  You could transform the desktop version of a website into the mobile version with the help of some of the plugins. The most common is the responsive design plugin, which is affordable and the best one for Google’s update.

2) Create mobile-friendly images: While adding images to your website, ensure that they are mobile-friendly. Special care should be taken to ensure that they are not too large, because that could take a significant amount of download time or even distort the page when it is completely loaded. A great way to do this is to follow this guide from the site point, which discusses how to ensure that your images stay a decent size when people are visiting your website on mobile.

3) Fix basic HTML for usage on smartphone: Fixing basic HTML on your mobile site will help with smartphone usage. When someone will be using a smartphone to access a webpage, he/she will be using your website differently. We will never use keyboards with our smartphones and most of us would prefer tilting our screens to get a better view of the website in landscape mode. It could be a serious problem, if you website is not prepared for both the kind of views.

Buck Up, And Become Mobile-Friendly

While this update may seem to be a little disturbing since it is slated to affect a huge number of website with greater impact, it is still a good initiative from Google. Mobile technology is here to stay forever, and the web world needs to make sure that it is geared up to meet the demands of the mobile age. The key is to provide excellence to the users.