Mobilegeddon: Why your website needs to be mobile friendly

With as much as half of the traffic on many web sites coming from mobile devices, it's just good business to have a web site that looks great when viewed on a cellphone or other mobile device. But now Google has changed the way that it ranks web sites, making it imperative that web sites are mobile-friendly. This change to the Google search algorithm - nicknamed Mobilegeddon - will penalize web sites that don't function correctly when viewed through a mobile device. And while that penalty will only directly affect searches conducted on a mobile device, the change has huge consequences for any business that depends on Google to help drive traffic.

What Does 'Mobile-Friendly' Really Mean?
The short answer is that a mobile-friendly web site is fully functional and easy to use when viewed on a mobile device. A responsive web site is one that has a design that can accommodate a wide range of mobile devices. The web site doesn't have to look the same when viewed on a cell phone or iPad. But a responsive web site is one that works just as well no matter how you access it. Google wants to direct mobile users to web sites that work best for their devices and that prompted the change in their search algorithms. But as important as Google is to most web sites, the larger impact is that other search engines tend to follow Google's lead when it comes to determining what might be the best search experience for a user. Which means that being penalized in Google's mobile search results will eventually impact your rankings in rival search engines as well.

How Do I Know If Google Considers My Web Site To Be 'Mobile-Friendly'?
Luckily for everyone, Google has a great little mobile-friendly testing tool located at https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/. You can enter the URL of any web site and the tool will examine it in the same way that Google's search engine does on a regular basis. The tool tells you if the web site is considered mobile-friendly by Google's search bots and in some cases it will tell you what you need to do to improve its mobile search functionality. The Google tool tests not just the way the web site is rendered on mobile devices, but also whether the links work correctly and if the functionality is as good on mobile as it is on a desktop.

Will This Affect The Amount Of Traffic I Get From Google With Desktop Search?
No directly, but there is an impact. Having a web site that isn't friendly to mobile devices might not be smart business, but it won't directly change your site's rankings in Google desktop searches. But because somewhere between 50 and 60 percent of all searches are done on mobile, a bad ranking on the mobile side will eventually impact your desktop search visibility. The lack of mobile traffic will make the web site seem less helpful in Google's eyes and eventually the overall ranking of your content will be impacted.

What Can I Do To Improve The Mobile Experience For My Web Site?
That really depends on your web site. Everyone from Wordpress to Joomla has been tweaking their web site templates to make them more mobile-friendly. So if you use one of those site creation packages, then it will be relatively easy to move to a web site design that is responsive to mobile. If someone else designed your web site and/or if it's a custom designed template, you might have to invest in a new updated look, especially if you current template doesn't look great on mobile. Sometimes it just requires a few tweaks to make your web site mobile responsive. But if it's been awhile since your last update, it's probably time for a complete overhaul.

So It Is Worth It To Make My Web Site Mobile-Friendly?
Do you like having a successful business? Mobile traffic accounts for more than half of the traffic to most web sites and it's generally considered a bad business move to make things more difficult for 50% of your customers. But the larger point is that since the percentage of visitors using a mobile device is only going to increase in the coming years, it makes sense to do the changes now and maximize that traffic as quickly as possible.