Avoid Penalties and Benefit from a Mobile Friendly Website

Improve your website so that your mobile marketing strategy will be more effective. How your website is displayed on a mobile device will now become more important for your organic marketing.

Penalties and Benefits in Search

Google has been making changes to their algorithms for determining which websites will rank on a mobile search. Last year they started penalizing websites that had errors when viewed from a mobile device. Now, they are making it possible for websites to be rewarded when they are considered to be mobile friendly.

As a business, mobile marketing should be on the top of your radar. With over half of the adult population owning a smartphone, mobile search is becoming more and more common. From a local perspective, most mobile searches are being done for convenience and being able to direct users to your business location can help you to generate more business. As with any online marketing the challenge becomes being found. You can have a cool looking website and a fantastic business model but if no one can find you, your business won’t grow.

Organic Marketing and Mobile Friendly Go Hand in Hand

Organic marketing can help you to generate more business because when you do it correctly, more users will be exposed to your brand. Things like being listed in local business directories, and online review sites can help. The ultimate goal, however, is to improve your page rank so that your website comes up at the top or near the top of search results for specific keywords. In order for this to happen on a mobile search, your website needs to become mobile friendly.

While previously Google only penalized companies whose site produced a bad mobile experience, they will now be looking for sites that are mobile-friendly. Google announced the launch of their mobile-friendly designation this month, and when someone conducts a search from their smartphone, websites will start to show up with this label. They have not specifically said that mobile-friendly sites will rank better, but it stands to reason that they will, since Google will want to display this new designation. Simultaneously, they have announced that they are experimenting with a new mobile search algorithm.

You can test out your website on the Google mobile-friendly testing tool. This will show you what problems your website has so that your webmaster can correct them. Most of the problems can be easily identified by simply pulling up your website from your smartphone. If it takes too long to load, the content is too small to read, or you have flash, these errors should be corrected right away. If you aren’t sure how to proceed, Local SEO Sites can help by building you a new responsive design website as part of your mobile marketing and organic marketing campaigns.