If your website is not mobile-friendly, Google may decrease your mobile search rankings.

 

On 4/21/2015, Google’s search algorithms will include mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal, which means that if your web pages are not easy to view and navigate on a mobile device, your rankings will take a hit. How drastic a hit is yet to be determined which is why many people are on edge. Google has stated that the implementation will roll out over several days, and each page will be either deemed mobile-friendly or not.

So, what should you do? If you get a lot of traffic from mobile users, you should definitely make your site mobile-friendly ASAP. If you don’t get much traffic from mobile users, then you can take your time in converting your site, but at some point you should probably make the conversion since mobile internet usage has overtaken desktop usage and is only going to continue to increase.

How to convert your site you ask? Well, there are a few options. The best option would be to make your site responsive. There are popular frameworks that can make this a bit easier – Twitter Bootstrap and Foundation are two that come to mind.  Or, you could create a separate version of your site designed specifically for mobile devices and place it on a subdomain (e.g. example.com for desktop, and m.example.com for mobile devices). Lastly, you could serve different versions of your site depending on the device. Google’s recommended method is to make your website responsive (see their mobile guide here: http://goo.gl/AKfJcP).

You can read Google’s official blog post here: http://goo.gl/AQmKgE

You can test whether or not Google sees your pages as mobile-friendly or not here: http://goo.gl/UqM2Oz

So, are you concerned about this change, or perhaps you’re already prepared and look forward to it?