It’s Official: Google Won’t Let You Get Away With A Non-Responsive Website Any More

Jessi Gurr — Sat, 05 Nov 2016 19:39:26 +0000

In our ever-changing, technology-driven world, most business owners have accepted the fact that smartphones and tablets are now leading desktop for online searches. People are looking for products and services from their phones, people are making financial decisions based on mobile content, and small business owners are working hard to keep up with this trend by ensuring that their websites meet Google’s standards for mobile.

…or are they?

Business Owners Have Been Slow To Adapt To Mobile-Friendliness

In April 2015, one of the biggest Google Algorithm updates in history was released: mobile-friendliness is now a ranking factor in mobile Google search results. This update, also known as Mobliegeddon, had business owners around the world scrambling to retrofit their websites to make them responsive.

Google itself has stated that “mobile is changing the world” – and this update is just one of many in recent years that has business owners investing in their most important advertising tool.

In this world where information is consumed primarily on mobile devices, one would think that the average business owner would be on top of important changing trends in SEO (Search Engine Optimization). However, just earlier this year it was estimated that nearly half of small businesses do not yet have a website – and moreover, of those that do have websites, nearly one-third do not perform well on mobile devices.

Many business owners saw significant traffic changes from the algorithm update, though many companies noticed little difference in their traffic, even after refusing to go mobile-friendly. But this is all about to change.

Google Isn’t Taking No For An Answer Any More.

If you are in the group of business owners who decided not to update your website, or if you were sold an inexpensive “separate mobile-friendly option”, things are about to change for your Google rankings. And this time, it’s for real.

Google will now check your mobile website’s content before your desktop website’s content when ranking.

What, exactly, does this mean? In a nutshell, it means that if you are delivering two websites to your customers (separate Desktop vs. Mobile websites), the mobile version is what Google will use to determine where to place you among your competition. When a business has two separate websites (mobile and desktop), more often than not the mobile site is a simplified version designed only to lead visitors to contact the business and not to rank on search engines. These small mobile-only websites lack the content that is needed to rank on search engines – and this is going to affect the placement of the full (Desktop) version.

The days of Desktop vs. Mobile are gone – today Google recommends a responsive website, where the exact same website and set of content are delivered to desktop and mobile visitors alike.

Buying a responsive template won’t cut it.

Yes, a cheap responsive theme may do the trick and make your website mobile-friendly. It might make Google happy for a while. But if your website is not built as a sales funnel, to convert traffic to leads, it’s not going to do you any good. Take a look at some of the low-cost templates on a smartphone before you buy, and take a look at your competition on mobile. Do the headlines flow on mobile? Can you vision your current set of content and pictures displaying on a smartphone? Do you know what it takes to convert traffic to leads on a mobile device?

A lot more than just the quick-and-dirty responsive design markup goes into creating a professional business website that will close leads. Our Minneapolis website developers have been hand-coding websites since 1993; we have more than 60 years of combined experience, and we have all been working in this field since the dawn of the smartphone technology. Our online marketing experts know what needs to be done to make your website go from just mobile-friendly to a mobile lead generating machine. Call 763-350-8762 to talk with an online marketing expert today.

The post It’s Official: Google Won’t Let You Get Away With A Non-Responsive Website Any More appeared first on Iceberg Web Design.

Responsive Design and The Decline of the Mobile Site

iceberg — Tue, 17 Nov 2015 06:00:58 +0000

When smartphones were just coming out (remember the Blackberry?), webmasters started thinking about optimizing their websites for mobile devices. At first, the trend was to create a separate website just for mobile devices. Typically, this separate website would be published at a subdomain – http://m.yourwebsite.com – and often times users would have the ability to toggle between the Desktop version and Mobile version of a website.

Today, the trend of having two separate websites is quickly declining – and for good reason! The early movers recognized a need to optimize for mobile, but is it possible to over-optimize? Nowadays, smart website designs are built on the basis of responsive design. What exactly is responsive design? Let’s go over the basics.

Responsive Design

Responsive design refers to the design of a website as it scales to different screen sizes. To explain a little further, imagine a website on your desktop. It has a lot of detail and the different pieces (menu, main content, footer) are spread out across the page. If you open the same website on a tablet, the design is slightly different, taking into consideration the new, smaller dimensions. The most obvious change is when you open the same website on a phone, and the elements are stacked and the design is much more minimal.

You can test for a responsive website without going from device to device. Just open your browser of choice on your desktop (or laptop) computer. Take your cursor and hover over the bottom left corner. Press your mouse button down and drag the cursor towards the left, eventually moving up. You will be able to see the website rearrange itself before your eyes. If it doesn’t scale, it’s not a responsive web design.

Another user-friendly characteristic of a responsive design is that you don’t need to redirect and approve of the mobile version of the website. Instead, the website just adjusts on it’s own, with no input necessary from the user. From the webmaster’s point of view, if you have a responsive design, you only have to update your website once. If you have a mobile version of your website, you will have to update that in addition to the desktop version. This causes an SEO problem in that the two versions of your website are competing for rank on Google.

The latest Google update has been referred to as “Mobilegeddon” because it has made mobile-friendly web design so much more important for ranking in search results. In the question regarding whether Google prefers a mobile version of a website or responsive web design, they have taken the stance that responsive design will help you to rank higher in search results.

It’s pretty clear that responsive web design has a lot of advantages, and creates a better user experience overall. If your website has a mobile-specific version, or no mobile-optimized version at all, contact us at Iceberg Web Design to see what options exist for fixing this issue!