Are you ready for Google’s mobile-friendly deadline?

Google has recently made a major announcement which means that from 21st April 2015 they will be favouring mobile-friendly website designs in their search results.

This news means that businesses that don’t have a mobile-friendly website will be shown less in search results and therefore could lose out on new business.

To avoid losing business to your competitors, it’s more important than ever to make sure your website design is mobile ready to help it rank well in Google.

If you are not sure if your website is mobile ready there are four things that you need to do now:

1 - Check your website

Use Google’s mobile friendly checker to see if your website is correctly configured and looks good on a mobile device.

Simply enter your website domain name into the testing tools and it takes just a few seconds to generate a summary report about how mobile-friendly your website is.

2 - Don’t panic

If your website is not yet mobile-friendly before 21st April there is no need to panic – but you do need to prepare. Your website is unlikely to disappear from Google straight-away but you should anticipate a gradual drop in search rankings as other mobile-friendly websites of your competitors begin to dominate in the coming months. It’s important to take stock, then plan and prepare your mobile-friendly strategy.

3 - Assess the impact

Identify how you might lose business by not having a mobile-friendly website. It’s important to understand how your visitors might be accessing your website by using mobile devices. When searching for business websites, anything between 30% and 50% of website visitors use a mobile device. It’s also important to understand how your target customers are searching for your products and searches: your mobile-optimised website must use the right keywords in-order to attract even more customers.

4 - Prepare your business

121mcv can make older websites mobile-friendly with relative ease. We can also redesign websites to give them a fresh, up-to-date look and develop online marketing strategies designed to attract more customers to your business.

Gareth Lisle March 9th 2015