Are you ready for Google’s new search engine update to see if your website is properly mobile friendly?

It’s called ‘MOBIGEDDON” and it is said to be the Armageddon equivalent of updates for websites that are not properly mobile friendly.  So if you’re like me, I go on my mobile phone to search things all the time and once again, rankings matter!!

If your rankings are great for desktop searches then you also must make sure that your search results don’t get massively penalized on April 21, 2015 by this upcoming Google update.

Getting Your Site Ready For Mobigeddon

Recently we published the news that Google is to update its algorithms on 21st April 2015 to ensure that it will in future rank sites better if they are mobile friendly. No doubt the news has had many a site owner rushing to Google Page Speed Insights to check if their site is good enough for mobile, but what do you do if you find that it’s not? We’re here to help at The Executive Edge and as such, here’s a quick guide to getting your site ready for what the industry has dubbed mobigeddon.

So all the advice…

About optimizing your images and other things to do for your current mobile website is not going to help you unless you have a specific strategy for mobilizing your site. What we did about a year ago was purchased some very high-end mobile website development software. Just check out our website, https://www.executiveedge1.com on desktop and then on your smart phone and, you will see 2 very different sites.

We will be happy to test your website for free.

Just Click Here

You should bear in mind when considering the initial design a few factors, including:

• Flash – whilst it’s still around it’s debatable how much longer Flash will be with us. Flash sites are impossible to index, as they contain no text and tend to be buggy too, so you should consider instead having animations done in HTML5  or JQuery if possible.
• Pop-ups – whilst a lot of sites don’t use pop-up ads, there is a current trend for pop-up lightboxes which contain a CTA such as newsletter sign up. These are great on desktop but can be far too intrusive on mobile screens, so either get rid or carry out some A/B testing to see how people react with and without it.
• Touch – mobile users do of course use their fingers when browsing a site on their phone or tablet to click, so ensure clickable areas are designed for fat fingers and that they don’t encroach on surrounding areas.
• Content – think about how you can ensure that the content being sent to mobile is relatively concise. Whilst you can’t do much about articles, these should be well-formatted so that they have plenty of white space, sub-headers, bullets and images so that they can be taken in quickly and easily.
• Local search – if your business is one that needs to be found by the general public, then you should also optimise for local search and ensure that all pages have a ‘Tap to call’ button on them.

Next Steps

Mobile has been an increasingly important aspect of the web for a few years now and it’s no surprise that Google is adjusting its algorithms to suit. If you haven’t already, you should be carefully considering and optimizing you site to be mobile friendly.

If you have any questions about your site’s mobile strategy, please feel free to contact us to discuss further.

See also our mobile web page  for further details.