DON’T BE IGNORED!

Googles New Indexing


Flashback photo to Rachel and her brother, Iain, looking surly when told they were not getting what they wanted. Cute (occasionally) in children, but not for website owners who want their hard work recognized and their website displayed prominently in search engine result pages.

Google has recently changed the way they index websites and has brought down the gavel on sites that do not display well on mobile devices.

Now that people use their phones and tablets more than laptops and desktop computers to browse the web, Google has made this change to better serve their users and give them better access to the information they are seeking and that is designed to be easy for them to access.

We have looked at web traffic statistics for most of our clients’ websites and confirmed mobile users now account for over 50% of all traffic. But many of our clients still have non-mobile websites. Globally, about 17% of small businesses do not have a responsive site.

If you have a non-mobile-friendly site then you will be ranked lower than if you have a mobile-responsive website. If you have a separate mobile site, from your main website, only your mobile site pages will be indexed. This is according to multiple articles we have reviewed, as well as communications directly from Google.

So if you don’t have a mobile-responsive website, the time has come to put this on your marketing priorities list for 2018.

Besides the new Google indexing, non-responsive sites can damage your business in other ways:

  • Mobile devices are projected to reach 79% of global internet use by the end of 2018.
  • 88% of consumers who search for a type of business on a mobile device call or go to that business within 24 hours.
  • Average smartphone conversion rates are up 64% compared to desktop conversion rates.
  • 83% of mobile users say that a seamless experience across all devices is very important.
  • According to Google, 61% of users are unlikely to return to a site on mobile if they had trouble accessing it and 40% visit a competitor’s site instead.
  • Nearly 8 in 10 customers would stop engaging with content that doesn’t display well on their device.
  • 57% of internet users say they won’t recommend a business with a poorly designed website on mobile.

Please contact John if you’re in need of a new, mobile-friendly website.