Pat here… I won’t say “I told you so… BUTTTT…” ????
I am starting to get notices that Google is officially RANKING BASED ON MOBILE FIRST!!! (started getting warnings 2 years ago!) Can’t believe it took this long.
What does this mean? It means because, from my analytics, 80%+ of website traffic is from phones, Google now only cares about websites that are mobile. (ie you don’t have to pinch and zoom to read your site on a phone, it automatically re-sizes to make it easy to read on a phone etc).
Resulting in sites that are not mobile friendly NOT BEING RANKED!!! In their words… Mobile-First Indexing. ?
In other words, if your competitor’s sites (all of them) are mobile and yours is not… you will be ranked UNDER ALL OF THEM. Soooooo… if you waited to upgrade your site things just got less “ranky” for you. Better get your web designer to help you out.
I recommend your friendly neighborhood web chick Angie Cherubini ?but her waiting list is about to get longer. ???????
Message her now! ? https://www.facebook.com/messag…/t/angie.franciscocherubini/
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From Mr. Google himself:
Mobile first indexing enabled for [Your Website]
This means that you may see more traffic in your logs from Googlebot Smartphone. You may also see that snippets in Google Search results are now generated from the mobile version of your content.
Background: Mobile first indexing means that Googlebot will now use the mobile version of your site for indexing and ranking, to better help our (primarily mobile) users find what they’re looking for. Google’s crawling, indexing, and ranking systems have historically used the desktop version of your site’s content, which can cause issues for mobile searchers when the desktop version differs from the mobile version.
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In summary, Google ranks sites based off of LOTS of signals. One of these signals that is becoming a very big deal is having your website be “responsive”. That’s just fancy web designer talk for “it works on all devices”, or it adjusts to phones to make it super simple on them.
The reason is that Google wants its users to be happy with the results they give them for a search. If you search for “web design in Newark, Oh” and it showed you The Cherubini Co and you clicked on it but it was not mobile friendly and you couldn’t read it or use it… What happens? You leave!
If this happens over and over eventually you’ll stop using Google. They know that so they are trying to fix it. i.e. They lose money!
Comment below if you have questions on your sites “mobile firstness”.