For a long time, business owners have had what I call, “The field of dreams mentality,” meaning, if you build it, they will come! If I build a website about Cool Widgets, people will find me. Well, Google, as usual, is changing things up.
Google is taking a page out of the Kevin O’Leary play book as of April 21, 2015.
It’s been dubbed “Mobilegeddon”, and it truly has apocalyptic repercussions. According to Google Webmaster Central Blog:
“Starting April 21, we will be expanding our use of mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal. This change will affect mobile searches in all languages worldwide and will have a significant impact in our search results. Consequently, users will find it easier to get relevant, high quality search results that are optimized for their devices.”
What does this mean to you? It means if your website is not responsive (a.k.a. mobile-friendly, you don’t have to pinch to enlarge, you don’t have to turn your phone to landscape in order to view a website), you will not get traffic. Google says “You’re dead to me!” Just like Kevin O’Leary! No matter what SEO you’ve done in the past, no matter if you are the only guy on the block, if someone searches for your goods or services on a mobile device and your website isn’t responsive, you will NOT show up in the search. Period. End of story.
Want to know if your site is responsive? Well, Google has a free tool for that! Of course they do 🙂 Simply enter your domain name/URL in this website by Google and they will tell you if you have a problem or not. If your site is responsive, YEAH!! Party time!! But….you still need to do some work. You need to go to this Google tool and see if there are any issues in your responsive site.
So, now what? Do you need an entirely new website? Oh my gosh, I don’t have that kind of money! Good news is, your solution may be quite minimal. If you are on the WordPress platform, there are several choices for plugins (applications) to make your site responsive. This is the best blog post I’ve found with the best choices. Some are free, some are paid. Remember, you get what you paid for.
There are also many websites where you can create your mobile friendly site, insert some code on your website, then when a visitor accesses your site from a mobile device, the mobile friendly site shows up.
This is way more technical than I normally like to get. If you’d like to have a discussion about where your site is at, I’m here for ya! This is what I love to do, I love to help businesses mold and shape and adapt. I love to help business owners tackle their digital marketing problems without draining your life savings! Real solutions without a loan.
If you are completely lost, or even lost just a little bit, fill out my form below and we’ll schedule a quick conversation to see what solution fits you and your business best.