No More Unresponsive Web Design! Mobilegeddon is About To Hit!

What is Mobilegeddon?

“Mobilegeddon” is going to take place on April 21st. Mobilegeddon is an anticipated algorithm update from Google as they recently announced, “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.”

This update will affect SEO (search engine optimization) and SERPs (search engine page results).  Google’s Gary Illyes recently revealed that Google is also planning on creating a separate desktop and mobile index. It has not been announced when this will be implemented, however, it demonstrates the urgency to be mobile-friendly. In order to get your site viewed and to function properly, you must cater to mobile viewers.

What does Mobilegeddon mean to business owners?

What this means is that if you do not have a mobile website, your website will not appear on mobile searches as it will not rank in the search engine page results. Not so bad? Latest stats show that 60% of users now search on their phone, especially while out and about. According to an update from January of this year, 80% of internet users own a smartphone. As a restaurant, it could significantly hurt your business to not be found by local potential customers.

What now?

We can’t foresee all the changes that Mobilegeddon will bring. However, the best way to maintain your search result ranking is by becoming mobile-friendly. If not, expect a drop in your site traffic and ranking results.

You can become mobile friendly by:

• Creating an Entirely Separate Mobile Site.
  • This means that a web developer creates an entirely separate website (with a different domain) than your main desktop site. For example, mobile.yoururl.com
• Making Your Site Mobile Responsive.
  • Mobile responsive sites take the content from your existing site and resize / reshape the content to appear on mobile screens.
• Implementing Dynamic Serving.
  • Dynamic Serving is a mobile configuration that creates a different HTML depending on what device the user is viewing the site from. This is similar to having a separate mobile site, yet without a separate URL. You can check out this Google article for more information on how dynamic serving works. Or compare Responsive vs Dynamic Serving.

As we are using our smartphones more frequently, many website developers are on top of the game and have built ‘mobile-friendliness’ into their site designs.

Not sure if your site is compatible for mobile viewers? Head over to this Google Mobile-Friendly Test page to test whether your site is mobile-friendly or not.

After analyzing the results, a page such as this will show up and tell you whether or not your website is mobile responsive or not. If it is not, it will tell you the reasons why on the left-hand side. In this example, the links are too close together, which would greatly affect clickability from a mobile device.

Let Us Help You Prepare

Although some may be acting like it, Mobilegeddon won’t be the end of the world.

At Designflair, we create mobile-friendly sites just for you! As a business or company, it is important to think about what content you want available on your mobile site. Contact us today to get your site prepared for Mobilegeddon.

We can discuss which type of mobile-friendly site is best for you and figure out a content layout. Google analytics of mobile sites is another service we provide, an important part of gaining mobile traffic.