On April 21, 2015, Google rolled out another one of its world-famous search engine algorithm updates. This time, the update impacted search engine rankings of websites that are not mobile-friendly. That means that if yours is not a responsive website, or you don’t have a separate mobile sub-site, Google may not send traffic your way. So, the question is: Is your website mobile-friendly?
What is a Mobile-Friendly Website?
Image Source: Wikipedia
Generally, there are two types of mobile-friendly websites:
- Responsive Website – This is a website that’s designed to detect when users are using tablets, cell phones and other mobile devices. It then “responds” by becoming mobile-friendly for easier navigation, reading, scrolling, panning etc…
- Mobile Sub-Site – This is a separate website where users on tablets, cell phones and other mobile devices are directed. In most cases, you can recognize these sites by the URLs. IE, entremarketing.net will direct your mobile device to m.entremarketing.net.
What is a Responsive Web Site?
According to Wikipedia, Responsive Web Design is defined as:
“…an approach to web design aimed at crafting sites to provide an optimal viewing experience—easy reading and navigation with a minimum of resizing, panning, and scrolling—across a wide range of devices (from desktop computer monitors to mobile phones).”
The Benefits of Responsive Web Designs VS Mobile Sub-Sites
These are just some of the advantages to choosing responsive website designs over separate mobile sub-sites:
- Makes it simpler for site visitors to link to and share your content online
- Doesn’t require separate website designs to show the same content on your regular site as what’s shown on your mobile-friendly website
- Reduces the common errors and issues that many mobile sub-sites suffer
- No redirection needed to allow mobile device users to access your website, reducing load time, improving user experiences
- Allows Google to access your site and its content with one Googlebot, instead of having to crawl two different sites trying to retrieve all versions of that same content
Why Switch to Responsive Design to Keep Your Website Mobile-Friendly?
It’s because of that last benefit that Google now penalizes sites that do not have mobile-friendly designs. Having to crawl multiple sites takes up unnecessary resources. So, to avoid this, when users search for people, places and things on mobile devices, Google simply disregards your non-mobile-friendly site altogether.
That means that the customer who was actively driving around town looking for your products and/or services, will never find you. Your competitor will get that sale instead.
Follow Us on Instagram
So, make sure your site is mobile-friendly… preferably a responsive web design? Ready to upgrade so you can stop losing out on important mobile search engine traffic?
The EntreMarketing Group can help improve your mobile traffic. Call The EntreMarketing Group at 888-507-2191 about upgrading your site to a responsive website today.
