Since the development of smart phones (just about 8 years or so), many marketers and web masters were under the assumption that having a mobile-friendly site was pointless; their thought process was that Google didn’t crawl or prioritize the content on the mobile site. People believed that having content that provided a good user experience for smartphone users did not matter to Google; if they weren’t wrong then, they are most definitely wrong now!
This all changed when Google announced the changes to smartphone rankings they were implementing in June 11, 2013. Google said that in the near future, they were going to start demoting websites, who provided a poor user experience to smartphone searches. Here are some of the common smartphone configuration errors many small businesses have:
- Redirecting users to the homepage when a landing page for mobile does not exist.
- Serving a 404 error to smartphone users if pages for mobile site do not exist.
- Having smartphone landing pages that load extremely slowly.
- Serving videos that are impossible to play on a smartphone.
These are just a few of the most common error web masters, and small business make when it comes to mobile sites for smartphones.
It should be fairly clear that having a mobile friendly website will help with your business. Almost everyone in this country owns a smartphone, and conducts searches using said phone. Wouldn’t it make more sense for you to provide an easy to navigate mobile site, to accommodate for the increasing number of smartphone users?! The answer is yes!
After reading this blog, you should have learned at least two things: your ranking will be affected if your mobile site is not user friendly, and secondly, having a user friendly mobile site will help increase conversions and business! So to prevent Google from penalizing your website, fix your mobile site right away, before it’s too late!
by Joe Giorgianni