You must create a mobile-friendly site to instantly reach out to billions of targeted mobile users worldwide. With just a single tap on their smartphone or tablet, mobile users can easily access information on your site and know about the products or services you are offering. With Google’s announcement regarding mobile-friendly algorithm, there is all the more rush amongst the webmasters to create mobile-compatible sites. The announcement says, starting from April 21, 2015, Google will not only label a site “mobile-friendly”, but will also rank the site higher on its mobile search results if it finds the same to be mobile-compatible!
The New Algorithm To Create More Impact Than Panda And Penguin
Google’s Zineb Ait Bahajji from the Webmaster Trends team has said this new mobile algorithm will create far more impact on Google’s search results than Google Panda and Google Penguin update did. Although Zineb did not specifically mention the percentage of queries to be impacted by this new algorithm, experts believe it will impact around 50% of all searches done in multiple languages on Google via mobile devices. Google announced the new move is a part of its plan of expanding the 2013 launched mobile ranking demotion algorithm. The search engine giant believes with this new update, mobile users will find more relevant, high quality sites to meet their specific needs.
Real-Time And Page-By-Page Basis
Webmasters worldwide will be happy to know that the updated mobile-compatible algorithm will run in real time, which means technically, a webmaster can update his site any day. As soon as you make your site mobile-friendly, Google will pick up on the change and your site will soon start benefiting from the new mobile-friendly algorithm update!
Additionally, another benefit of this new algorithm is that it will run on a page-by-page basis, which means if you have 15 web pages on your site and 10 of them are mobile-friendly while the rest 5 are not, only the pages that are mobile-friendly will benefit. There are many sites that have multiple sub-pages or sections; this announcement has relieved the webmasters since they don’t need to hastily make all pages mobile-friendly by April 21. They can work on the web pages gradually to benefit from Google’s algorithm.
Steps To Make Your Website Mobile-Friendly
1. Make your mobile web fully optimized
Even though you have a mobile-ready site, it is important to perform a mobile SEO audit to find whether your mobile content is optimized enough for achieving a high ranking on Google’s mobile search results. Make sure your site images, CSS, JS are crawlable. You should also check mobile usability issues such as use of Flash, improperly sized content, and touch elements for optimization purpose.
2. Evaluate your mobile web search visibility and traffic behavior
Is there any discrepancy in top queries and pages in mobile search and desktop search? Are your mobile users searching for information in the same manner as your desktop users?
3. Monitor your web performance
Try to find keywords for which your mobile search competitors are ranking. Use those keywords in your site for optimal performance.
