Ready for Google’s Mobile Update?
If you pay attention to SEO (search engine optimization) at all, then you know that Google is releasing a change to mobile ranking. Sites that are not mobile friendly will take a serious hit on SERPs (search engine result pages) for people searching on mobile devices.
If you aren’t sure if your site is mobile friendly, check it using Google’s tool.
Not Mobile Friendly? Fix it Quickly!
If you fail this test, you had best get busy prior to early next week. If you use WordPress you can use one of any number of plugins to make your site mobile. WPTouch is a good one. If you are not on WordPress, I suggest you get started with a hosted mobile site by using a service such as DudaMobile. I tested this service a few years back and it worked well. There are myriad other services that perform the same task. You pay a monthly fee, it creates a mobile version of your site, you drag and drop to make some basic edits, and you are set.
Make Sure Your Mobile Site Works Well
I am suggesting you do whatever you need to to get your site mobile friendly right away. But once you do this, you should work on a site redesign as necessary. You want to make sure that your website doesn’t only pass Google’s test, but a user friendly test as well. Check out your site on different types of devices (you can use plugins on desktop browsers to do this, but I also suggest you physically look on as many different phones and tablets as you can) and make sure that your site is easy to use. If whatever measure you have used to make your site mobile friendly doesn’t give you a user friendly result, you need to make some changes on your site. A complete site redesign may be necessary. You might choose to have two different designs (one for mobile and one for desktop) or you might choose to go with a responsive design. A responsive design is one that changes automatically based on the size of the user’s screen.
Working Contact Information is Critical
Make sure that your contact information is readily available. Frequently, on responsive sites, the contact box ends up towards the bottom. This isn’t a huge deal as long as you have a readily available phone number on the top as well as a contact page that is easily accessible for mobile users. Make sure that you test out whether your phone number is clickable and works on mobile phones. This means that when someone on a phone clicks the number it dials it for them. Sometimes the phone number is set as a link, and that link tries to open a webpage instead of actually dialing a number. That is useless. Make a point of checking this, because many people who find you on mobile may just be looking for your phone number.
Conclusion
If you aren’t ready for mobile get ready now. Don’t wait. If you do, who knows how long it will take you to recover from the algorithmic hit if you wait until after the update is released.