Per Google ( in 2016 ) most people are searching from a mobile device.

But I still see a lot of website that don’t look good on mobile. They’re not responsive – fitting nicely on any sized screen – and they don’t have a mobile version ( like m.website name.com ).

Considering that well over half the visitors are now looking at it on mobile, this hinders the businesses promotion a lot, because people tend to bounce away and go elsewhere if they can’t easily read and navigate your site.

And now the next handicap of mobile un-friendly sites that’s developing … Google is indexing mobile websites for their search results as the 1st priority, then followed by the desktop version.

Google says here …

[quote style=”1″]Mobile-first indexing means Google will predominantly use the mobile version of the content for indexing and ranking. Historically, the index primarily used the desktop version of a page’s content when evaluating the relevance of a page to a user’s query. Since the majority of users now access Google via a mobile device, the index will primarily use the mobile version of a page’s content going forward. We aren’t creating a separate mobile-first index. We continue to use only one index.[/quote]

While their March blog post says not to worry about it influencing your exposure in search results, the post does qualify that point further down !

So what should you do ?

  1. Your website needs to be responsive. That means that the page elements readjust to best fit the device is being view on. The pages are easy to read, and the website’s easy to navigate.
  2. It’s also possible to fit your page content into separate templates and display the correct one for each device it may run on, but I can’t think of too many situations where that easiest solution ( maybe bank account pages ).
  3. Make sure that website templates and extensions to the website ( plugins or modules etc ) are coded efficiently well – read the reviews for any extensions you add.
  4. Cache the pages : more written here … https://spellboundweb.com/6-step-website-tune-up
  5. Make sure that you don’t decrease the good content too much on mobile devices. On smaller screen sizes, it can be helpful to makes pages a bit cleaner and shorter by reducing the content. But if the mobile page is being indexed first then it needs to keep the good content – as this is a major relevance & ranking factor ( a tricky trade-off ).
  6. Images: Read my last post regarding retina-friendly images & image sizes … https://spellboundweb.com/how-big-should-website-images-be
  7. Make sure that the META description tag is a good sales message that encourages people to click through to the page. The META description is what’s displayed in Google’s search results by default : see here … https://spellboundweb.com/why-you-should-write-meta-descriptions

And just as important, make sure that your website pages encourage people to contact you – offer them incentives to leave an email address or phone number, or call you themselves. The most valuable asset of any business is it’s list of contacts !