Google Now Checks Your Website Is Mobile Friendly. Are You Ready?
For indexing websites, Google’s web crawlers will now label sites ‘mobile friendly’ and they are also testing this as a ranking signal. So… Time to think mobile – if you haven’t already.
Google are always looking at what hinders and what helps a searcher when they enter a query into their search engine. Something that can be considered a negative experience for a searcher who is using a mobile device like a smartphone, is when the pages are not optimised so they fit well into the smaller screen. It can be like looking at a giant poster with a magnifying glass on one corner of it. The copy can hang off, look too large and the result is an irritating user experience – something Google considers to be a bad search result – if purely for the incompatibility of the site with the device used for the search.
Optimise Your Pages
In truth it’s not a big deal to make sure you have pages that can be optimised but you do need to check a few things.
The Googlebot will be looking for these criteria on the mobile version of your website:
- Avoid software like Flash, software that is not common on mobile devices
- The content should size to the screen so there is no scrolling left and right or zooming in needed
- Links need to be far enough apart so they don’t clash or get accidently tapped
Don’t Forget To Check
You can check your pages with this Mobile Friendly Test or read the documentation on the Webmasters Mobile Guide on how to make your site mobile friendly. In addition you can use the Mobile usability report which highlights usability issues across your website.
Being optimised for mobile is now not just a good idea for usability – it looks like it might be another issue that may affect your ranking in SEO.
For advice on how to optimise your website for mobile devices – contact Varn on 01225 863 047 or click here.
