Mobile Friendly Websites
Today, Google will penalize websites that do not conform to its standards for being mobile friendly. This video shows you how to tell what Google thinks of your site.
Many, many of the things that happen in search are fads; do you remember the Author tangent Google droned on about? This was maybe five years ago and Author authority was a ranking signal. Many of us wrote books so our sites and articles would rank better. Get it on Amazon and make sure Google knows about it… there’s a couple months worth of evenings I’ll not get back.
Mobile is no silly fad and you must pay attention. This is one ranking signal that is not going away and it will harm the tourism based business that fails to pay attention. This is common sense: nobody is packing their 27” iMac to take on vacation. Visitors are using their smartphones to find your business.
Most searches on the Internet are done on a mobile device and most of these searches are local. See the Local SEO lecture for more. The most common device on the Internet between five and nine in the evening is the tablet. In other words, if you don’t have a responsive website, get one now and act like its an emergency. Which it is for a tourism based website.
67% of smartphone users said they were more likely to purchase from a business’ mobile-friendly site, while 61% said they’d most likely leave a site that wasn’t optimized for mobile (Tourism Research Australia).
Responsive design has become so important that Google is now penalizing websites that don’t employ some form or mobile friendly design. Put together, this fact and the paragraph above paint a picture a mobile device market that is now eclipsing desktop. Put another way, there is no point in having a website if you don’t make it mobile friendly.
If you want to know more about this important issue, please contact us.
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