What do you mean it’ll disappear from Google search?! How can they do that?! I paid good money for my website!
Ok, keep calm guys, your website is not going to completely disappear from Google search, people will still be able to find you if they google your business specifically or they are using a desktop computer…you’re only going to start having trouble if your website isn’t optimised for mobile devices.
Before you breathe a sigh of relief, consider this:
70% of Australians own a tablet or smart phone device (32% own both). Over one third of these users access the internet via mobile 5 times or more a day, and a quarter spends more than 10 hours a week accessing the internet via mobile at home.
These are not statistics that should be ignored. The accessibility mobile platforms provide means there is a staggering growth rate of people transferring from desktop usage to mobile usage. People now have the ability to act on instantaneous thoughts like: I wonder who can mow my lawns for me, or I’m hungry, where’s the best Thai place in my area?
These random thought patterns are what your business needs to be capitalising on, and Google knows this and the growing statistics, that’s why come April 21 they are going to change their search algorithms.
What does this mean?
It means from April 21 if your website is not optimised for mobile devices, it will be sent down the search ranks and will be less likely, and very unlikely, to appear in google searches made on mobile devices. Basically, you will not be able to reach the large portion of the population that uses their mobile devices to find information on the internet.
This, you can understand, is not good for your business at all.
How do you know if your website is mobile optimised? Well, you can use Google’s mobile friendly test, or open your website up on your desktop and drag the window around, making it smaller. If the website detracts with the window and changes its layout automatically to fit the re-sized window properly, then you’ve got a mobile optimised website – congrats!
If not, you’ve got a problem on your hands.
Now a lot of agencies reporting about the new algorithm have been panicking people by saying that it is way more costly to create a mobile optimised website – this is simply not the case! Most web development companies now should automatically create mobile-optimised (tagged ‘responsive’) websites when you hire them. WordPress templates for example are extremely easy to automatically optimise for mobile devices. While you can have separate codes created specifically for different devices, there is no requirement to do so, especially if you are a small or medium sized business.
We have worked with a number of different content management systems (CMS’s) over the years, for ease of use and great support we have found WordPress to be the better one out there. All our current clients who hire us to deliver top-notch websites automatically get a well-designed, clean and mobile-responsive website.
So if you fall into the categories of either not having a mobile-optimised website, or not having a website at all, contact us immediately and we’ll get to work making sure your business retains a spot on Google and presents a professional online front, attractive to clients.
