Google announced yet another update, but this one was not another animal named search algorithm. Instead, this one, which was released on April 21st 2015, has to do with the ranking factor on mobile search results. Even though this has to do with mobile sites, don’t let it fool you, if it’s from Google and it’s an update – one that is forecast to be bigger than Panda or Penguin, chances are it’s something you should be paying plenty of attention to. The first thing you need to know is this; websites that are available as of right now, that are NOT mobile friendly, are subject to losing rankings. This is a serious matter especially for people like you that have worked hard to get their website in the ranking position it’s in right now! Losing ranks means losing a lot of traffic and what does traffic equal? Readership, sales, business – staying afloat! If you haven’t heard about this update, or you want to know more about what you can do, what you need to worry about and how to fix your mobile un-friendly websites, continue to read more below.
What to Do Now
Obviously the update is already passed, BUT if you are just reading this now and aware of it, there are things you can to prepare yourself and your website for further updates. As with all the Google updates, I do believe there is a grace period.
– Make sure you measure the differences between your mobile versus desktop performance of your websites. You can do this with quite a few tools such as Mobility SEO
– This is something you should be doing anyway, but make sure you track your keywords, spots on the search engines and URLs that are specific to mobile
– Mobile Page Audits: You can do this yourself, but they do take a bit of time, or you can hire an SEO company to do it for you. You will need to scan and crawl your entire website and fix any errors.
It’s important that you take a look at your website and review traffic coming in from mobile devices. This doesn’t just include phones either; its anything mobile where the Internet can be reached such as iPads, Kindles, any brand of Tablets, iPods, any MP3 players, etc. Pretty much any device that people use to access your website. When possible or if enough data is available, you need to understand whether the people coming to your websites from those devices are just visitors and if they are visitors, how long are they staying, are they crawling other pages and reading other things or just landing on your homepage and leaving. Furthermore, if you find that these visitors are purchasing something from you or making potential money for you, you need to make a choice as to whether you are going to do a quick fix to fix the site, or if you intend on spending more money to fix it correctly for now, and in the long run.
You do have choices, but the one you choose, could make or break you, especially if you ignore the stuff above and don’t analyze and get enough information. You can either ignore the deadline or create a mobile friendly site when you want, how you want, on your own time. You can hire a top SEO company no matter the cost and fix it now before the deadline comes into play. Or you could just hack in a few quick fixes before the Google Wrath comes down upon you and your website. The choice is up to you. Obviously, I wouldn’t choose the first option, if my life depended on it. The second option is for people that really have money to spend on a whim. The third option is quick, but it’s a temporary fix, you will need to really get into it after the deadline and fix the website correctly in Google guideline terms.
Quick Fixes
If you are, like most people, freaking out about this and the deadline that Google has put into play, and you choose to do quick fixes, here are some things I suggest doing.
– Mobile Plug Ins: Some sites like Yola and WordPress these days allow a literal one button click to make your website mobile friendly. If you have this option available to you – do it. If not, look on WordPress search to find a plug in that will make it mobile friendly, or in the least, more responsive.
– Force your page: you can force your page to fit into the “screen” of your mobile users. One thing to consider is adding code to your website such as the <Meta name=”viewport” width=device-width initial-scale=1> tag. If you don’t know what this is or how to add it you should look it up on… Google.
– Mobile Friendly Test: The other day I logged into my panel on Host Gator and they actually had a mobile friendly test. Turns out there are quite a few sites that offer this. Look and see if you can find a few mobile friendly test sites, Google also has one. If your website is mobile friendly, great, you don’t have to do anything more!
