Do you have a mobile-friendly website?

• Posted by Terri Wise
• in Responsive Web Design/Development
• on May 4, 2015
• 2 Comments.

Did you lose website traffic due to #Mobilegeddon?

Enter site:your-website.com on Google to check on the status of your website

On February 26th, Google announced a change in their algorithm for mobile search that began on April 21st. The change means that Google will focus more on mobile-friendly websites in mobile search results, and in effect, penalize those website that are not mobile optimized. Many techies and industry experts predicted seeing many websites losing their top rankings like what happened when the recent Google Panda (2011) and Penguin (2012) changes kicked in, so this update was nicknamed #Mobilegeddon.

From what we understand, the immediate impact was not as great as predicted since the algorithm change was made strictly to Google’s mobile search. However, it’s definitely time to begin making changes if your business does not already have a mobile-friendly website. Reviewing search traffic and analytics show a big change in the time spent on mobile devices (60%) versus desktops (40%). While some industry experts claim mobile traffic isn’t as valuable as desktop traffic in terms of conversions and sales, as usage increases the value of those searchers will most likely increase as well. If you have Google analytics set up on your website, you’ll be able to see how much traffic is coming from smart phones and tablets. Looking at Wise Choice Marketing’s traffic so far in 2015, we see 70% of our traffic coming in through desktop searches and 30% from mobile devices (mobile searches may be much higher for other industries). For WCMS, that’s already a big increase from 2014!

Test your website on Google Webmaster Tools

If you’re not sure your website is mobile friendly there are a couple of ways to check. Go to Google and type site:yourwebsite.com in the address area (example: we typed in site:wcmarketingsolutions.com). If the results are returned with “mobile-friendly” under your URL, you are in good shape. Web developers or website owners can also check websites with Google Webmaster Tools. Go to the mobile friendly test page on webmaster tools, type in your URL and you’ll get a response letting you know if your website, or client’s website is mobile friendly like the photo shown here to the right.

While there are a couple of different ways to quickly optimize your website for mobile devices like creating a separate mobile website or downloading a plug in if you’re using WordPress, we suggest creating a responsive website. Responsive simply means that your website adapts to whatever screen size your website is being viewed on and re-flows text, images, navigation, links, etc. so it’s mobile device friendly. Keep checking our blog for an upcoming video explaining more about responsive websites.

Wise Choice Marketing Solutions can help you get your website up to speed with either one of the quick fixes or by creating a responsive website. If you need additional information or would like to discuss it further, please contact us by emailing info@wcmarketingsolutions.com or calling (937) 419.0075.