From time to time, I like to offer guest posts to readers, provided they’re not actually commercials masked as guest posts (i.e. you’re writing it to share knowledge, NOT gain a cheap backlink to your client’s site. You know who you are.)
This is a guest post by Nate Vickery, a proper Internet marketer from Sydney, Australia. He’s also a big fan of Australian Rules football, a game I enjoy watching and don’t understand a second of.
The Internet is all about efficiency and fast exchange of information. Nowadays, when the number of different gadgets with various resolutions is on the constant rise, website developers have to adapt their sites to those new devices. We’ve all experienced pages that are not mobile- or tablet-friendly. Those pages and sites simply turn off their visitors. But in April, some great changes were introduced by Google, concerning the future site ranking when it comes to mobile searches.
How does it work?
Google experts want to award site developers and owners who make an effort and adapt their sites to mobile devices. Since April 2015, the most popular search engine worldwide has been updated and now it gives a special treatment to mobile friendly sites and pages when an Internet user does the surfing from a mobile device.
First of all, it affects only separate, individual pages and not whole websites. Secondly, it applies to search ratings only when the query is done from a mobile. Also, this mobile-helpful Google update functions in all the languages that are used throughout this search engine. The major advantage of this approach to mobile net search is that users will not have to tap their screens and wait for pages to load, since the update brings about smoother and more user-friendly exploration of the mobile Internet.
Where could this take us?
If users have troubles when trying to load a site, they won’t wait endlessly for it to load, but will simply leave the site and never come back. So, you could create an expensive and useful site that will remain unattended and unused, due to its bad responsiveness to searches from different devices.
Before the update, mobile-friendly web design had been discussed a lot, but there has never been such a bold step forward in helping mobile users get the best out of their Internet presence. If we know that today smartphone searches are overtaking the throne from PC net quests, only the sites that are functional and adapted to these new circumstances will have an increase in traffic. Eventually, websites that do not conform to these latest changes will not be ranked high and they will not have enough users to justify their existence.
The week after the update launch
This change in the site ranking service did not come out of the blue, so it sounds illogical that some well-known websites simply ignored the update. In order to become a mobile-friendly site, it is necessary to either develop a special mobile version, or apply responsive website design. The market treated differently the sites that made the changes and those that did not.
Since the introduction of the new update on April 21, a week after its launching there were some interesting data about the way websites reacted to this Internet search novelty. According to this list of winners and losers, the sites that did not adapt to the new method of Google ranking calculation in the mobile world have already fallen behind. The sites that employed either one of the ways for optimizing sites for mobile search were on the winning side.
Also, it has to be said that some sites do not care about the mobile share of the market. They are content with desktop users and have enough success and profit from PC and laptop visits.
The future is mobile-friendly
As smartphones and tablets overtake the Internet from old-school desktop computers, some changes are inevitable. Also, it is clear that most of the mobile users are teenagers and younger people. They want it all and they want it now.
Social media and video/music websites are under special pressure from that group of Internet users. Those businesses and websites that offer the most responsive and fastest service will have the highest conversion rate, which will eventually lead to a higher income and more opportunities for future investments. Websites that miss this chance and rely only on traditional Internet search have to be ready to face quite serious problems. It would be wiser to go with the flow to prevent the flow from drowning you.
The latest Google update has already caused changes in the way people find what they want from their mobile devices and it will shake the mobile web even more. The only thing site owners need to do is prepare for present and future changes to keep their sites on the winning side of the net — embrace mobile-friendly design, and stay at (or reach) the top of the Google rankings.
Nate M. Vickery is a marketing and internet marketing consultant from Sydney, Australia. His specialty is online marketing and, in recent years, website design and development he learns mainly from reading blogs of local creatives like Infinity Technologies. Aside from work, he enjoys a good game of Aussie football.
