Having a mobile-friendly website is important for providing a great user experience on mobile devices. However, it is now playing a huge role in how your website will rank in mobile search results, particularly with Google. Google released a search ranking update in April which checks for your website's mobile friendliness. The update affects website ranking in mobile search for individual pages and not for the entire website.

You can use Google's mobile-friendly test page to find out if your website meets Google's criteria for mobile friendliness. If your website doesn't pass, you may want to consider responsive web design to optimize your site for mobile devices.

Google's Criteria for Mobile Friendliness

Google lists the following criteria on their blog:

• Text is readable without zooming
• Content resizes to the screen so that users do not have to scroll horizontally
• Software that isn't compatible on mobile devices such as Flash is not installed on your website
• Links are far enough apart so that users can select the link they want

How to Make Your Website Mobile Optimized

The best way to ensure you have a mobile optimized website is by using responsive web design. A web professional such as a web designer or developer can design and build your website according to the latest web standards for mobile-friendly design.

Once your website is responsive, you can view it on various mobile and tablet devices without any interruption in user experience. Your site will expand and contract according to the size of a screen giving it a fluid appearance. Text and images will shrink and increase as needed to fit the screen.

Not only does this provide a great user experience, your website will have a greater chance of ranking well in the mobile search results.

Contact us today to learn more about how to make your website mobile optimized.