What to do if your website isn't 'mobile-friendly'?
Google has provided a range of resources to help you update your website and make it responsive (mobile friendly). You'll be able to follow the links from the testing tool and get help from its guide to creating mobile friendly websites.
But if you're hyperventilating at this point because you've just discovered your website isn't mobile friendly, here's some comfort. At the time of writing, even some of the big names in SEO haven't made their websites mobile friendly. (We're looking at you Moz.com.) So what's that all about?
Online chatter seems to suggest that Moz's current lack of mobile-friendliness could be due to the fact that most of their traffic doesn't come from mobiles. And a laid-back response from Moz that appeared recently, basically said, 'Yeah, it's all in hand, but there's no huge rush'.
If only a small percentage of your traffic comes from mobiles, you might not need to panic either. The way to get the breakdown of your traffic is to dig into the analytics for your website. Look under Audience>Mobile>Overview and you'll be able to see which percentage of your traffic comes from a mobile device. If the majority of your traffic is from a desktop, there may not be such a rush to call your web designer.
However, few businesses are happy to gamble on the impact of Google's algorithm changes, so you might still want to add a mobile friendly update to your To Do list.
What next for the world wide web?
Despite all the online hype and the thrilling Mobilegeddon talk, Google's latest update hasn't caused a worldwide upset just yet. In fact, the friendly folk who write Google Australia are positively reassuring, stating on 22 April: "mobile-friendliness is just one of 200 signals that we use to determine the ranking of results", also adding, "sites that aren't as mobile-friendly as they could be won't disappear. In fact, they may still rank highly if they contain great content that people really want."
So the sensible take-home message about Google's mobile friendly update is, yes it's worth taking the change seriously and planning to take action if you need to. But losing sleep over the responsiveness of your website? There's no need for that just yet.
Words: Andrew May of Mays Digital
Andrew May is a web design and development expert heading one of the UK's leading design agencies.
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