Google Draws a Mobile Line in the Sand

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Mobile-Friendliness Factors in Google Rankings Starting April 21st.

Is Your Website Mobile-Friendly Enough for Google? Look around and observe people in any public place and there’s a good chance you’ll see someone browsing the web on a smartphone. One-fifth of Americans access the internet through mobile devices each day, and this number is only growing.

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Some Advantages of a mobile friendly website:

• You can engage users with mobile-specific features such as click-to-call and mapping functions.
• Customers can connect to you with location-aware technology when they are geographically nearby.
• A mobile website immediately helps you stand out with a positive, contemporary brand identity.
• A well designed mobile website puts you in a better competitive position.
• If your website doesn’t look good on a smartphone, searchers will quickly move on to another that does.
• A great mobile web experience ensures that you capture visitors’ attention.
• A mobile-friendly web experience improves search engine rankings – now more than ever…

Why Now?

Google announced a new algorithm update for April 21st that checks a website’s mobile friendliness as a pivotal factor for how it ranks. Though a business invests great effort to build search engine competitiveness, if a website is not easy to access and experience from mobile device, that site stands to lose significant ranking “clout” with Google.

The official word from Google Webmaster Central Blog: “Starting April 21, we will be expanding our use of mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal. This change will affect mobile searches in all languages worldwide and will have a significant impact in our search results.”

Specific points that Google’s Webmaster Trends Analyst, Gary Illyes, made at the SMX West Conference in early March about the coming algorithm update included:

• Google will judge “Mobile Friendliness” on a page by page basisThis means that your entire site must be mobile friendly to pass the check.
• Your site must unblock CSS & JavascriptSite code that blocks elements such as CSS and Javascript, will cause your site to fail Google’s mobile friendly test, even if everything else on the site passes. So you do need to allow Googlebot to crawl both CSS & Javascript.
• April 21, 2015 is a very important day“Have (your websites) ready by the 21st and it will be good”, said Google’s Gary Illyes.

Even Bayshore Solutions will be re-launching our own new website in early April to ensure a much needed positive mobile experience for our visitors. (Stay tuned – we’re very excited for this debut!)

Our expert team has delivered engaging and effective mobile-friendly websites for many customers and we can certainly help your business’s website pass the April 21 Google update with flying mobile colors.

Contact us  or call us today at (855) 445-0580 to learn more and get started.