Your Website Visitors Come First, Not Google

Back in April Google released an update to their search algorithm. Many called it Mobilegeddon.

It was billed as one of their biggest algorithm updates yet. But it was only going to impact the mobile search rankings.

You may have heard about this through your Google Webmaster Tools account which is now called Search Console. By the way, when will Google stick to a name? Google My Business was Google Places for Business and Google Local before that.

Anyways, Google has a mobile friendly tool which tests your site to see if it was just that. So they tested everyone’s site early in the year and if yours wasn’t mobile friendly, you recieved a warning message like this.

Surely you got that message and that you pay attention to your Webmaster Tools account. Even if you didn’t, you have at some point thought about converting your site to a responsive design/making it mobile friendly. And if you haven’t you need to right away. Not to appease Google and their algorithm, but to give your visitors a better user experience on your site.

Care More About Your Visitors

Considering it’s 2015 and so many people (insert stat here) are using their mobile devices, your site should be mobile friendly. And it should be because you want to give your visitors a great user experience and not because you want better Google search rankings.

Care more about your visitors.

It’s common in SEO for business owners to think more about optimizing their sites for Google rather than the searcher. They look too deep into keyword density and writing content that was created for a search engine crawler and not a human being.

The Google mobilegeddon update brought the same.

Many business owners were focusing more on appeasing Google. It shouldn’t have taken a push and perhaps a threat that your mobile search rankings would plummet if your site wasn’t mobile friendly. All it should have taken was business owners to realize everyone has a mobile phone and everyone is browsing the web on them.

If you don’t a mobile friendly site, people will find a competitors site that is. So the bottom line is out care your competition and provide the best mobile experiece for your visitors.

The Mobilegeddon Update Hasn’t Had An Impact

We didn’t write about the mobilegeddon update because we didn’t think it would have much impact on the mobile search rankings. And as of today, November 19th, they’re still websites that are not mobile friendly ranking higher than mobile friendly ones.

Here are the search results from my mobile device for “care homes Victoria BC”.

There are four search results in the top seven that aren’t mobile friendly. Here are three of those sites.

If you ask me, these sites provide a terrible mobile experience and shouldn’t be ranked where they are. I’m still in my 30’s and am having a hard time reading those sites! Nevermind their market which is mostly children with parents who are 70+ and needing a care home.

So we’ve yet to see the impact and big changes to the mobile search rankings. But that shouldn’t stop you from having a mobile friendly site.

Care more for your visitors and provide them with a great mobile experience on your site.