Google Mobile SEO

Google will penalise your site if it isn’t mobile friendly

Google has worked very hard over the years to become the search engine of choice and in our opinion, is the single most important website in the world! To keep it in its rightful place of market dominance, they must continue to improve search. Features such as contextual or predictive search help, but you can’t rule out just improving the results delivered. This is the reasoning behind their latest update.

In the quest to make the internet a better place, they have announced that they will start to penalise websites which are not mobile-friendly. These sites will be pushed down the search engine ranks and mobile friendly rivals, pushed up. This is a bold action as it’s estimated that over 75% of websites are not currently friendly. We agree with Google and in fact have a policy of only building mobile friendly sites. Even our entry level sites c. £500 are fully responsive, meaning they work on all screen sizes. The simple fact that across the sites we control over 50% of traffic is mobile/tablet and that figure is rising, means that we cannot have it any other way.

When can a website be called mobile-friendly?

A website is mobile-friendly when it can load on the mobile browser without losing its essence. This means that the settings of a website are such that they can easily adapt to whatever electronic device it is loading on. This will result in the website text and content to fit according to the screen size of the electronic device, the images are easily shown and the audio and video are played without increase in add-ins. All this is important if it results in improved user experience which is the top most aim of all mobile-friendly websites.

Responsive Design Vs Dedicated Mobile Site

There are 2 real methods of achieving a mobile friendly site. The traditional method was to build a separate mobile website to run alongside the desktop one. A more modern approach is to build one site, which adapts to the screen size. We call this responsive design.

We’ll cover the differences, pros and cons in a future blog post, but either of these methods (if implemented correctly!) will keep Google and your customers happy.

How will this affect corporate organisations?

This is both good news and bad news for businesses. Those businesses that don’t yet have a mobile-friendly layout will see a sharp drop in their traffic and ranking as Google will make mobile-friendly websites a priority and put it on the front. Businesses can use different tools by Google to check the “mobile-friendliness” of their websites.

How to check websites for mobile-friendly

Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test is one way of testing a site for the smartphone. Another important tool by Google is The Mobile Usability Report which shows whether a website is usable or not. Website ranking and traffic is often further affected so it’s best to check for minor details like website speed, unavailable video and audio, image blocking or redirecting to desktop layout of website.

Google’s PageSpeed Insights lets web designers see how fast a website downloads on a smartphone or an android. SEO is terribly affected if a website’s mobile version redirects to its desktop version.

Dorset Tech is up-to-date with all the latest trends in web design, app development, and software development. Our team of experts not only present solutions to our customers’ most difficult issues, but as a social enterprise, we ensure that good web development is affordable for both small and big companies alike. Why not request a free website audit and we’ll tell you exactly how Google’s changes effect you?

Useful Links:

Google Mobile Friendly Test: https://www.google.co.uk/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/

Web Master Tools Mobile Usability Report: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-usability

Page Speed Insights: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/

Chris Ryu "Chameleon"

Chris has been a developer for over 15 years. Known for his unique experience crosses over many fields.

Comments: 2

  • Digital Marketing Minneapolis July 27, 2015 2:18 pm

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    help with SEO? I’m trying to get my blog to rank for some targeted keywords but I’m not seeing very good success.
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