Whether it’s on your desktop or mobile device, monitoring your company’s digital presence has never been more important. However, the growing accessibility to digital media through mobile devices is causing many businesses to focus more attention to the user-friendliness of their mobile websites. Google is increasing the pressure by announcing mobile SEO changes. These changes will expand the use of mobile-friendliness as a ranking impact in search results.
Google’s focus on mobile-friendliness is due to the increasing use of mobile devices for web searches. Google wants businesses to meet the demand of society’s growing reliability to mobile information.
Google’s Mobile SEO Changes
- Making sure a mobile site’s design is mobile-friendly, businesses must make sure that icons on their mobile site are spaced and ordered in such a way that allows users room to click on appropriate icons.
- No more flash. Google is telling businesses to avoid mobile faux pas, which means no flash, pop-ups, or poorly sized embeds.
- Increase attention to mobile site operations: businesses should use Canonical Tags for page redirection, site recourses should be crawlable, and a site’s speed will contribute to its evaluation.
As digital marketers, we want to present and explain to our customers how developing a user-friendly mobile website is not only an important business strategy, but also a decision that must consider all the available options.
One of the main areas of attention these changes are forcing businesses to consider is their site’s mobile configuration. Businesses must consider the differences between responsive and dedicated mobile sites, and what questions to ask themselves before creating a mobile site.
Mobile Site vs. Responsive Website
Separate mobile sites are easily accessible by users. Often, they contain less content and the site is easy to navigate. Where this options runs into problems is dealing with mobile device resolution variations, and the need to maintain and develop two separate sites.
A responsive website solves this problem by taking a standard websites and fitting it to the different screen sizes depending on the mobile device – this way you only manage one site. Responsive websites convert the content of the site to fit any device. However, responsive sites are generally more complicated to build and require a larger cost to start up.
Google’s SEO changes contribute to the need for businesses to focus on their mobile sites, but Google has also made a point to show that changes happen quickly. Businesses have to look to the future of their mobile site to see how it will adapt to future updates.
Separate mobile sites may be mobile-friendly today, but future changes may not be easily handled by dedicated mobile sites. To correct these future changes would require more cost and effort. Responsive sites, however, are more equipped to work with newer browsers and devices. A business’ plan for the future will contribute to their decision between a separate mobile site and a responsive site.
Mobile-friendliness is becoming increasingly more relevant to business strategies. Questions like mobile site configuration must be handled in ways that guarantee reliable mobile activity and relevant content for users. Google’s SEO changes are bringing to light the importance of mobile information. As Digital Marketers, we want to keep our customers in front of the curve by working with them in ways to connect businesses to possible customers. Those connections are strengthened by presenting customers with clear and usable information. Optimizing a company’s mobile site under Google’s changes is the next step in developing a user-friendly mobile site.
To learn more about Google’s mobile algorithm update, you can check out their announcement and of course, call us anytime.