Google announced that on April 21st they will make a change to their search algorithm. That change is to create a more mobile friendly algorithmic change. If your website is attached to Google’s webmaster program, then you may have seen, over the last month, a message that your site is not mobile friendly. So if you have not made your website mobile friendly you really should get your mobile ducks in a row.
Mobile compliance is a large deal in the internet marketing world. The reason is that now 30% of internet traffic is coming from mobile devices and that number is only going to grow. Making your website mobile friendly will only help your customers find you easier.
Now this first update is likely not to affect a large amount of your organic traffic. Most estimates have the new algorithm affecting only 1% – 2% of organic search traffic. However, this number will become larger on future updates if you do not make your website mobile ready.
So here is a list of common mobile mistakes to help you gear up your website:
- Slow uploading mobile pages – In order for your user to have a great mobile experience, your pages need to be geared to upload quickly onto mobile devices
- Irrelevant links – Make sure your mobile links do link to other mobile sites.
- Mobile 404s — Some sites serve content to desktop users accessing a URL but show an error page to mobile users. Instead, redirect mobile users to an equivalent mobile page to avoid 404s.
- Faulty Redirects — If you use separate mobile URLs make sure each desktop URL redirects to the appropriate mobile URL
- Blocked Scripts – In order for Googlebot to see the mobile page as your user would, they need access to your files. Make sure your Robot.txt file is not restricting any files.
- Unplayable content- Make sure all content is playable on a mobile device.
- Fixed Widths — The mobile world uses many different screen sizes. Make sure your page adjusts to the screen size. Using percentage measurements will help along with other mobile tools.
If you would like more information, please contact us for an audit of your site and its mobile effectiveness.
