Or is your site an old time grouch who refuses to make new friends and display properly on mobile devices?
If you had a site 10 years ago, being able to be seen on a mobile device was a thought probably not occurring to you. 10 years ago, people were worried if their site was displayed properly on all desktop browsers or they were fiddling with Flash, trying to implement animations and increase user interaction.
But now, in 2015, the question in the title is one you will have to ask yourself: is my website mobile friendly? Hopefully, the answer will be a yes and not a no. But if you don’t know at all what the answer is, Good’Ol Google can help you with finding out. Use Google Mobile-Friendly Test tool and check if your site is mobile or not.
You have the question and if you did not already have the answer, with Google’s help, you now also have the answer. But why is this information relevant to you?
Well, it is relevant thanks to… once again, Google. Starting April 2015, Google thinks that “when it comes to search on mobile devices, users should get the most relevant and timely results, no matter if the information lives on mobile-friendly web pages or apps” and that is why they took two measures: expanding their use of mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal and they began to use information from indexed apps as a factor in ranking for signed-in users who have the app installed – you can read more about this in Google’s official announcement: Finding more mobile-friendly search results.
Long story short, for mobile initiated Google searches, your site will appear higher in the search results if the site is mobile friendly and lower if not. Why should you care? Well, according to Google, back in May 2015, in ten countries, including USA and Japan, more Google searches are performed on mobile devices than on desktop computers.
The trend was clear and it was once again confirmed when on the October 28th, Google’s Amit Singhal, senior vice president of search, announced: “For the first time, we’re getting more searches on mobile devices than on desktop”.
So, if you add up all this information, the larger picture reveals itself: more than the 50% of your potential customers are searching for your business on the internet by using mobile devices. And if your site is not mobile friendly, those potential customers might just go to your competitors’ mobile sites and who could blame them? They just might rank higher in the Google search results.