With the rise of the smart phone, the importance of optimising your business site to be ‘mobile friendly’ is becoming a necessity in today’s market. According to research by Econsultancy, 60% of business owners report that clients research their companies using their phones before engaging with their website and services more fully. This is an important statistic, as a good first impression can lead to a sale and continued web traffic for the site. However, if a site appears ungainly and awkward on a mobile device, clients are likely to try the next search result on the list to find a better user interface.
Being Mobile Friendly
To help with mobile phone optimisation, the Search Engine Journal (SEJ) reports that Google have just launched a ‘mobile-friendly test tool‘ that will enable website designers and business owners to find out if their site matches Google’s criterion for a good mobile-friendly site.
In a statement, a Google executive said that they are planning on adding whether or not a site is mobile-friendly to their ranking criterion for searches in the future. Therefore not having a site that meets the specifications could not only hurt businesses in mobile searches, but hamper their SEO ranking on all devices.
For now though Google are just providing a label system to sites that meet their specifications. So when search results are listed on the search engine’s display page those that have invested in mobile optimisation will be afforded a ‘mobile friendly’ tag. While this doesn’t affect SEO rankings yet, any sites that can boast this tag will almost certainly be selected over those without. Especially by the 60% conducting primary research on their mobile devices.
Here’s what you should do
If you have one, your web-developer can be trusted to make the changes to your site, if it hasn’t already been optimised. Otherwise, if you are looking for the factors that Google considers to be most important for a site to be mobile-friendly, SEJ reports that these are key:
– Text size needs to be clear without users having to zoom.
– The site should allow for easy navigation through well spaced links and buttons to avoid a miss-tap.
– Content must fit perfectly to mobile screens, so users don’t have to scroll horizontally.
– The site should be free of applications or software unsupported by mobile devices.
