How Important Is Mobile-Friendly Design for SEO?

The short answer to this is YES it is very important! As you will see below that Google and other search engines are now placing huge importance on a website being mobile-friendly and having a responsive design which adjusts automatically to fit any screen size.

In April, 2015, Google released a critical new mobile-friendly ranking algorithm designed to boost websites with mobile-friendly pages in Google’s mobile search results.

And in May, 2016 Google rolled out the next version of the mobile-friendly update. Google Webmaster Trends Analyst John Mueller declared saying, “The mobile changes mentioned here are now fully rolled out.”

In Nov, 2016 Google starts mobile-first indexing, using mobile content for a great many search positions. While called an ‘experiment,’ it’s truly the first move in Google’s planned shift to looking chiefly at mobile content, rather than desktop, when determining the best way to rank search results.

Google mobile-first index will mainly consider the mobile variant of your site for its ranking signals and fall back on the desktop variant when there’s no mobile version. In the past, Google crawled your website as a desktop computer user. Now, however, your website will be crawled as a mobile user. That’s a differentiation that is really huge.

Why is a Mobile-First being used by Google to index?

The inevitable happened in 2016, and mobile overtook desktop as the principal device used to visit sites. However, this did not come as much of a surprise as Google reported in 2015 that more searches were made on mobile phones than on any other device category.

Google uses more than 200 ranking signals to decide where your website should come up in the search results. If the Google bot finds that your site is not mobile friendly or pagespeed load time is slow, you’re not going to be coming up the top of the search results.

What if you don’t have a mobile friendly site?

If you don’t have a responsive website, you could be asking yourself: “What’s likely to happen to my site?” You’re able to rest easy. The Googlebot will crawl the desktop version of your site just fine, despite the fact that it’s using a user agent that is mobile. That means your site may nevertheless be indexed.

However you should definitely consider making the switch over to a responsive website template. In today’s age, anyone who is serious about getting their business online needs a website that is responsive and adjusts to fit any mobile device.

The best way to test out if Google considers your website to be mobile-friendly is by using its Mobile-Friendly Test tool.

In conclusion, with the trend of more and more people using mobile devices primarily smartphones to search and browse the web on in 2017, if you have a website that is not responsive you should definitely consider having your website redesigned. Here at A1 Websites we are happy to take your old website and turn it into a fantastic new responsive layout which all your customers viewing your site on mobile will greatly appreciate.