In the past several months webmasters and owners of websites that are not mobile friendly have been receiving email notifications from Google. This caused much speculation around whether or not Google was going to update the algorithm again.
Starting April 21st
No further speculation is needed because it’s official. On Feb. 26th Google announced, “Starting April 21, we will be expanding our use of mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal”. You can read the full article on the Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: http://goo.gl/eW3Y7V.
Is Your Website Mobile Friendly?
You can find out your mobile friendly score using Google’s Mobile Test tool (http://goo.gl/vSXl5S). If your website passes, it’s mobile friendly. If it’s doesn’t pass, you should start thinking about a strategy to add mobile to your website. This is also a great opportunity to look at your mobile SEO, your mobile ranking and the mobile search terms that can increase your websites traffic.
Have us Test Your Website Page Speed
In the announcement Google played down mobile page speed and won’t be considering it a really important factor, however you shouldn’t ignore the overall importance of page speed. For example, if everything is equal between you and your competitor’s page, but they’re faster, they will outrank you.
Contact us today for your free mobile friendly and page speed consultation.
Code Compliance
The quality of the coding or programming on your website can have an impact on how Google ranks your website. It is important to ensure that your website is compliant with all current standards. The new Google test tool also evaluates your coding compliance.
HTTPS
The other change that has taken place is the HTTPS update. Back in August 2014 Google announced on the Webmaster Central Blog it was experimenting with taking into account whether a website had HTTPS or not. The test results were positive and so they started using it as a ranking signal.
Google went on to say this, “For now it's only a very lightweight signal — affecting fewer than 1% of global queries… over time, we may decide to strengthen it.” You can read the full article here: http://goo.gl/9vuWLw.
For more information about how these changes might have an impact on your search visibility contact us for a free consultation.