It’s true. Google is going to be changing the way the rank search results on April 21st. They will be ranking mobile friendly sites higher in the results than sites that are not mobile friendly.
Curious how you can have an competitive advantage in the mobile search ranking wars?
The answer is as simple as providing your users a great mobile website experience.
OK, but what exactly does a “great mobile website experience” mean? Here are a few things you should consider:
- Don’t require your visitors to “pinch and zoom” to navigate through the website
- Have a mobile friendly navigation – ever see those three lines that look like a hamburger? That’s it, hide your navigation until your mobile visitor requests it.
- Have large enough tap zones- Google recommends buttons no less than 48 pixels… and leave some room between buttons- Google suggests 32 pixels.
- Compress images, css, js and html so that it downloads as quickly as possible over 3G and LTE connections.
- Separate your text from images. It’s tempting to add text onto an image, but when that image is resized the text may become unreadable. Plus Google cannot read text that is put in an image.
- Don’t use tables. Tables just don’t translate well from computer screen to smart phone screen.
When you think you’ve given your visitors a great mobile experience head on over to Googles Mobile Friendly tool and see what grade you get: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/
What you’re looking for is a result like this:
It’s okay if you don’t get a green badge of Awesome-Sauce the first time. Google will tell you the steps you need to take to get a good grade.
If you would like some help interpreting your results contact us and we’ll be glad to help. If you’re more of a do-it-yourself kinda guy or gal- check out Google’s Webmaster Mobile Guide.