Time For Spring Cleaning – Refresh Your Website For Higher Google Ranking

As tulips bloom, April deadlines loom.  Not that dreaded Tax Day, but rather Google’s April 21st Mobile-Friendly Website deadline. In recent news, Google ranks mobile-friendly websites higher in search results.  Per Google, “This change will affect mobile searches in all languages worldwide and will have a significant impact in our search results. Consequently, users will find it easier to get relevant, high quality search results that are optimized for their devices.”

If this is news to you, then here are few points to get you in the game:

So what does that mean for your website? If you’ve put off developing your website in either responsive design or a separate mobile site, then your site will have difficulty ranking in mobile search results.  If traffic to your website is predominantly mobile and your website is not mobile-friendly, then your traffic will most likely be decreased due to low ranking. 

Just how much of the traffic to my website is mobile?  There are several tools available for answering this, but the obvious choice is Google Analytics.  Google Analytics is able to segment the number of hits from desktop users versus mobile users.  Once you have the facts, you can determine if a responsive website becomes a high priority for Q2.

Try a few links using Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test.  The test  provides clear results as to whether your site is mobile-friendly or not.  In addition, it provides potential issues, a view of how the page displays on a mobile device, and suggested changes to your website.

Bottom-line: Don’t panic.  There’s still time to ensure your website ranks highly. Keep in mind that updating the mobile friendliness of your website doesn’t have to happen all at once.  Google’s algorithm will look at the mobile friendliness of each page.  If you have a page that gets more hits on mobile devices, start with that page and then address the remaining pages of the website. It’s these little updates that keep you fresher than the competition.