Quick Concepts

Google Likes It When Your Website is Mobile Friendly

Keeping a mobile friendly (and ideally mobile responsive website) is not only a good look – and a good experience for your website visitors – it’s also a fundamental element in making sure your website is as visible as possible on Google these days. If your website isn’t mobile friendly – Google is going to push your site down in the search page. Responsive design generally just means your columns stack on each other, making sure the text is visible – and often includes other elements like a mobile menu and some simplification of the design for mobile.

• Use Googles’ Test: https://search.google.com/test/mobile-friendly
• Review Google’s suggestions
• Fix or delegate to developer

Full Transcription

Hi, it’s Tim Brown, and this is another episode of “Google Likes It.” Yes, I’m drinking a little Red Bull so I can keep my jazz hands going during this video. Today we’re going to be talking about how Google likes it when your website is mobile friendly. Keeping a mobile-friendly website is a lot more important these days. It’s not just for the fact when people come to your website on a mobile phone or tablet that they can see the text, they can use the menu, and they can navigate around, it’s also now used for Google’s algorithm. Google is going to show people’s websites that are mobile-friendly higher in search results when your customers are searching. It’s very important to have a mobile-friendly website. Just a couple of the things that equal mobile friendly are your columns. Let’s say you have a three or four column layout on your website; they stack on top of each other. Often there’s a special menu for mobile devices, in the industry we call it the hamburger menus, which is that three bar menu up at the top that you tap and it opens the menu options. Another last one is that buttons are 45 pixels by 45 pixels wide and tall so that you can tap them with your finger.

A couple things to do to get started with mobile-friendly if you’re not sure if your website is mobile-friendly:

1) Do Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test – I’m going to put it in the description below the video

2) Review Google’s suggestions

3) Do them, or delegate to a web developer

That might take a little time, but it gives you pretty clear suggestions on what you need to do. It might be to make the buttons bigger, but it often involves what’s called media queries. It tells the browser to re-size things based on the device. It is very important your website is mobile-friendly. Likely many of you already have a mobile-friendly website, but it’d still be good to test your website using this tool below to make sure and to see if there’s anything else to make it more mobile-friendly. It does matter in search results.

That is your “Google Likes It” for the day. Try me next week for another episode of “Google Likes It.”