2015: Year of the Mobile?

Hi. Is 2015 finally the year of the mobile? Well, for search engines it’s certainly starting to look that way.

Back in late November 2014, Google introduced something called mobile-friendly labels. Mobile-friendly labels appear in mobile search and results pages on results that have websites optimised for mobile use.

So why should we care about optimising our websites for mobile use? Well, there are two main reasons. Firstly, user experience. If a user visits a website and it’s not optimised for the device they’re using — in this scenario a mobile device — they’re more likely to leave and go to a competitor’s website. But if they go to a website that is optimised for that device, they’re more likely to stay for longer, which increase the likeliness of them converting.

Secondly, ranking benefits, recently Google announced that sites that are optimised for mobile use will receive significant ranking benefits as of April the 21st (2015). So there is still time to prepare your websites. This is clearly showing that Google is starting to take a bigger focus on the mobile user, and they are starting to realise the importance of mobile searches.

So how do we get a mobile optimised website? Well, minimal use of unsupported software on mobile, so this can be Adobe Flash.

Correctly sized text. So you don’t want a user to go to your website and have to zoom in to read your content, because if this is the case, then it’s clearly not optimised for mobile use.

Spaced links. You want to make sure there’s enough room between each link so the user can click on it without having to click on multiple links at the same time.

And lastly, responsive design. You want your website to respond to different size windows, so obviously with different devices and different phones they have different size screens. You want your websites to adapt to these different size screens.

If you tick all these boxes, you’re likely to get this mobile-friendly label. You’re also likely to increase a user’s experience, which in the end will result in a ranking benefit come April 21st (2015).

That’s the end of my video. If you need any more information, please get in contact. Follow me on twitter @LukeTheMono. Thanks for watching.