Is Your Site Mobile-Friendly For SEO?

It can be quite frustrating having to go through a website on your mobile phone that hasn’t been optimised for mobile devices. In fact, it’s probably one of the most frustrating things consumers have to deal with when surfing the net on the go.

Poor Text, Link and Image Visibility

What’s the point in accessing a site using your mobile if the text is practically impossible to read, the links are barely visible and the images are hardly recognisable?  Well, Google have decided that enough is enough and revealed a useful addition to search results will be introduced in the coming weeks specifically aimed at those using mobile devices.

Criteria For A “Mobile-Friendly” Page

Those of you that are avid Google users on your mobile phones may have already noticed that Google has started to introduce a “Mobile-friendly” label in their search results on mobiles.

The ever-reliable Googlebot will now analyse a selection of criteria before stating that a search result is “Mobile-friendly”. You’ll be able to see the label alongside the meta descriptions in the search results.The criteria that a web page must comply with in order to be classed as “Mobile-friendly” are as follows:

• Software that is uncommon or not regularly used on mobile devices i.e. flash will be avoided
• Text must be readable without the user having to zoom in
• Links need to be far enough apart so that it’s not an absolute nightmare trying to tap the link you’re actually after
• The content on the page needs to be sized automatically so that scrolling is no longer necessary

You can use a Mobile-Friendly Test provided by Google to see if your site complies with the set criteria. Google have stated that they are keen to ensure mobile users have “a better mobile web experience” and that they are “experimenting with using the mobile-friendly criteria as a ranking signal”.

Why Is A Mobile-Friendly Website Important?

There’s no doubt having mobile-friendly pages available on your site will only increase traffic and improve the overall performance of your online business.

The capabilities of modern mobile devices allow access to detailed and concise content. Potential clients are using their phones on public transport to access web pages more than ever before, so you could be losing out on a significant number of potential enquiries.

We Can Help

We’re always up to date with changes such as this one here at Artemis and something like this certainly can’t go unnoticed if we’re to get the very best results for our clients.

To learn more about mobile-friendly pages and how they can help your site, make the most of our free consultation service.

P.S. In case you’re wondering, no our site isn’t responsive yet! We’re working on it now and we’ll be writing a blog post about what it takes to make a website responsive.