Not Having A Mobile Friendly Site Can Hurt Your SEO

Optimising your website for mobile users has become even more of a crucial task.

Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s webspam team was recently quoted as saying, “Mobile is going to surprise a lot of people. Be sure you look at how your site looks and performs on mobile.” Google also has stated that a big part of how well a site ranks in search will depend on how well a website is optimised for mobile devices.

Mobile websites and responsive design are not new, and up until now, the reasoning and value behind making sure that your website offers the best possible mobile friendly experience has mostly been based on the steady up-tick in mobile traffic, which tripled in just 2 years from 2010 to 2012, however has now become also about Google search rankings and how you could be affected by running a not so friendly website for mobile users.

Google always reminds us that they look at search from the perspective of the user. If your web content is not optimised for the viewport of a mobile device or your content is full of large image files that take a long time to load on mobile devices you need to address this now.

Properly configuring your pages for mobile devices, Google says, “will improve the mobile web, make your users happy, and allow searchers to experience and experience your content fully.”

Ultimately, if you are providing a poor mobile experience and your competitors have great responsive sites offering an easy to use and intuitive interface, Google is likely to use these factors and list your competitors’ sites ahead of yours on certain devices.

In closing, think about your users first and then Google. “Google wants what users want.” Says Matt Cutts. Take a look at your web strategy from the eyes of your users and you will be fine.