- Amongst many other things, Google considers your site’s ability to display well on mobile devices as one of the factors that influence your search engine ranking
- Sites that adapt their appearance when viewed on a mobile device are called responsive websites
- Google’s favouritism towards responsive websites is particularly evident when the person searching Google is doing so from a mobile device
What should you do?
If your site is already responsive, do nothing! If your site isn’t, don’t ditch it and build a responsive site just because of Google’s changes.
However, you should take the opportunity to assess how many of your visitors use a mobile device. If this is significant, you should consider a responsive site anyway, irrespective of what Google’s doing.
Remember: Google is not abandoning people with non-responsive sites. But responsiveness, now more so than ever before, is another factor to consider as part of your long term web strategy.
Assess your competition: are your rivals’ websites responsive? If so, perhaps they’re about to get a rankings boost that will pass you by if your site isn’t.
Google tweaks its rankings regularly and sites that are mobile friendly now stand to fare better… although nothing replaces the importance of well written, topical content.
