Google Penalizes Non-Mobile-Friendly WebSites

In case you haven’t noticed, the world is going mobile. And going strong.

2014 was the year that officially the number of mobile devices exceeded the number of humans in the world. In three decades, mobiles went from zero to more than 7.2 billion. And this number is growing more and more every year. Not only the amount of devices but also their usage by the people who own them. That is, us, you, your clients, your potential clients, basically - everyone.

But this is not news. What should interest you in this context is, are you and your business prepared to a world controlled by mobile?

Is your website adjusted to mobile? Are your marketing materials responsive to different screens? Do you think about marketing for mobile in a different way then the way you think about desktop marketing? Does your business need an app? If yes, when are you planning to launch it?

So, yes, you should be prepared. You need to think about your online assets in a way that is also mobile oriented. Actually, you MUST think about it.

Google, as the most popular website and search engine in the world, has already started a process of mobile thinking and acting. A change that has already been made is adding a “mobile friendly” label next to search results on Google. The purpose is to give users a better search user experience.

Another change Google is about to do in their algorithms is to affect, badly obviously, the ranking of websites that are non mobile friendly and improve the ranking of those labeled mobile friendly. This change will be officially online April 21^st  2015.

Screen shot from Google Webmaster Center Blog

If you’d like to know if your website is mobile friendly and if you’re protected from a deranking in Google, you can check your website in this link.

Quantum Media Mauritius website in Google's Mobile Friendly test

If you realize/know that your website is non mobile friendly, this is the time to change it.

It’s not only about Google and your site's ranking, it’s also, mainly, about user experience on your website. A user that comes to your website and needs to zoom in to read your text, resize the screen to focus and out of focus for content, tried to click a link and clicked another because of too many links close to each other, is not a happy user. In fact, it’s a very bad user experience and most likely that this user will not visit your website again (not from mobile, at least).

In our daily work, here in Mauritius, we see many websites, some are brand new, that are not designed and planned for mobile or any other screen size. You'd be surprised to know that even the biggest Mauritian companies' websites are still non-mobile-friendly.

Think mobile. Changing your website is just the first phase, but it’s a good place to start.

Did you know that...?

Before making an in-store purchase, 50% of search users begin their search with a mobile device