Why Being Mobile Friendly Just Got A Lot More Important

It’s been common knowledge for a while know that being mobile friendly was going to be a lot more important for businesses, especially with the rise in use of smartphones and therefore a rise in mobile search traffic. Mobile friendly is when your website resizes itself to suit the display of a smaller screen, without losing the functionality that it would have on a desktop.

In March a post on the Google webmaster blog stated that as of May 2016 an update to the search algorithm would help users to find websites that are more mobile friendly. Mobile friendliness has been used as one of the many ranking signals for search since last year however now it has taken on a greater importance.

The most important thing to take away from this latest announcement is that if your website is mobile friendly than there will be no negative impact on your site. Alongside this, if you’ve not got the resources in place to upgrade your site to a mobile friendly version, then it will still have a good chance of ranking if it has high quality content and matches other ranking signals.

There are a number of reasons alongside this change in algorithm that mean it is important for your business to have a mobile friendly website some of these include:

• • Google says that officially, now more searches happen on mobile devices than computers in 10 countries such as the US and Japan. This doesn’t include tablets, which it counts in with computers
  • For local search, having the right information to hand is important – if people are looking for a specific product or service nearby then they need to be able to access your site and see what you have to offer them
  • If your website doesn’t work well on mobile devices, then people won’t stay. The bounce rate for mobile devices for a difficult to use site will be large. In order to convert traffic to sales, then people want a simple intuitive website to use. This is especially important if you are using paid ads for traffic, people need accessible calls to action (CTAs) and easy to use menus etc.

• You’ll fit your users behaviour. Not necessarily all conversions will come from mobile use – however people will often do their research using their smartphone and then convert at a later date. If you are mobile friendly then they will have a pleasant experience and potentially return to buy from you. If you put them off with the site being slow or hard to navigate then you risk losing the conversion.
• Smart phones and tablets are increasing in popularity – this market will therefore mean that mobile traffic and searches will increase. If you’re equipped for it and optimised for it then you should gradually see more traffic
• Android’s latest operating system marshmallow has become even more google focused with more integration than ever. Google now on tap is a system that reads the content of sites you’re on and then helps with searches to suggest content and information for you – the longer you have it, the more you’ll get from it.

As you can see mobile friendly is growing in importance all the time, and rapid innovations mean that it is good to be prepared and have the right site in place to help your customers get the most from their experience.

Speak to Zelst today to see how we can help you improve your site when it comes to being mobile friendly! We can help you with this along with a whole range of SEO and Inbound Marketing needs!