Is Mobile-Friendliness A Google Ranking Factor?

It has become imperative to keep up with the latest SEO trends to beat competitors. One such trend that many businesses are facing today is creating a website optimized for mobile-friendliness. But does being mobile-friendly have any effect at all on your overall ranking? That's what we're here to answer today as we explore whether or not mobile-friendliness is actually a factor when it comes to your site's placement in Google searches. Hang tight while we uncover some hard facts and insights!

Does Mobile-friendliness Affect Google's Ranking?

Mobile-friendliness is an essential factor for ranking in Google Search Engine Results. A webpage passes the mobile-friendly test if google believes it is optimized for mobile devices. If the webpage passes the test, google reward it by improving its visibility in the search result on mobile devices.

Parameters to Check the Mobile-friendliness of a Webpage

• The page should be seamlessly viewed on a small screen without zooming or horizontal scrolling.

• It should have large fonts so everyone can read the texts easily.

• Images should be of appropriate sizes and well-optimized for small screens.

• The links should be easily spaced to tap them, even on a smaller touch screen.

If the page fails to pass these abovementioned parameters, google may lower its rank on mobile devices. As a result, the visibility of search results will decrease. Consequently, it will affect the traffic of the site.

Next to the abovementioned four parameters, you also have to make sure the following

• Javascript, CSS, and image files are not blocked for crawling google spiders.

• There are no incorrect redirects on the website.

• There are no missing notices to find mobile-friendly content.

In most cases, SEO analysts often overlook these abovementioned points. Just because you have made your page looks fine on a smartphone doesn't mean it is 100% mobile-friendly.

What is Google's Mobile-friendly Update?

Google released the "mobile-friendly update" in 2015. It aimed to boost the ranking of webpages in search results on mobile devices. This update, Mobilegeddon, was intended to promote mobile-friendly pages in mobile search results. The main intention was to improve the user experience. The update was applied to the search results of all languages and search queries.

This update caused a whirlwind in the SEO world. Many non-mobile-friendly websites experienced a steep decline in their rankings on mobile devices. This affects their traffic and visibility on a large scale. 

Importance of a Mobile-friendly Website

As mentioned, a mobile-friendly website can help a site ranks higher on Google's search engine result pages. However, it also comes with several other phenomenal benefits.

Increases Conversion Rates

A mobile-friendly site has pages optimized to be easily visible on all mobile devices. This makes the user easily read and access content.

Mobile-friendly websites increase user engagement by improving user experience. This persuades visitors to spend more time on your site, increasing the chances of conversion.

Improves Mobile Traffic

Almost everyone is using smartphones to search online nowadays. As a result, mobile traffics have surpassed traffic from desktop users. Developing a mobile-friendly site is not an option anymore. A well-optimized website is likely to rank higher in google search results. With better visibility, your site will get more traffic.

Get Better Visibility on Social Media

Everyone uses social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. A mobile-friendly site has more chances to appear on mobile search results. If mobile users like your articles or content, they will likely share them on social media. This increases your chances of getting more organic traffic.

When you get more traffic, and user engagement, google pushes your website to the desktop search results page.

Five Ways to Check the Mobile-friendliness of Your Website

Following are the ways to test whether your site is mobile-friendly −

Conduct a Mobile-friendly Test

• You can do the test in Google's mobile-friendly mobile-friendly tool.

• Enter your website's URL

• Click on Test URLCheck the results

The tool will tell you if your website is mobile-friendly. If not, the results will display the reasons behind it. You can take the necessary actions to rectify the mistakes and rerun the test.

Use Your Desktop Browser

You can do that with your desktop browsers like Chrome or Firefox.

• Open your website on the browser.

• Click on the right corner side of the browser and drag it towards the left. This brings your browser window into minimized view.

• Grab the left side of the window and shrink it.

• Do the same from the right side too.

• Shrink the screen to the size of a smartphone screen.

If your website is mobile-friendly, the images or texts will stay on all sides.

The images will appear vertically, and the texts will realign and resize accordingly.

If the website is not friendly, the contents and images will not readjust to the screen size.

Note −

Mobile-friendliness is one of the hundreds of factors google considers to rank pages. Even if the site pages are mobile-friendly, it doesn't guarantee an improved ranking. Other factors that play a role in search engine rankings include quality of content, page authority, relevance, page loading speed, bounce rates, etc.

Improving your site's visibility on mobile devices is a great way to increase traffic. If your visitors stay on your website longer, Google will definitely push your site's ranking in the SERPs.

Use Your Mobile Phone

Following are the steps to check the mobile-friendliness of a site using a mobile phone −

• Open the website on your phone

• Check how each image aligns

• Check how the contents appear when you zoom in or zoom out the screen

• Check if you have to scroll right or left to read the image or see an image

If the page is mobile-friendly, you can engage with all the images and content without any issues.

Use Chrome DevTools

• Go to chrome and open the website.

• Right-click anywhere on the page and click "inspect."

• Click the "toggle device toolbar."

• Choose "responsive."

If the website shrinks, your website will be mobile-friendly.

• The next step is checking whether the website loads on other devices successfully.

• Click on the "responsive" option. You will see several mobile models in the drop-down menu.

• Click on at least 2-3 mobile phone models and compare the results.

If the contents aren't trimmed and adjusted easily on these devices, your site is mobile-friendly.

Use the Google PageSpeed Insights Tool

The Google PageSpeed Insights tool helps you determine if your website is mobile-friendly. The tools also give you several crucial data regarding your website.

• Go to the Google PageSpeedInsights page.

• Enter your website URL.

• Click "Analyze."

• Check the "mobile" option in the tab next to "desktop." 

If the contents appear cut off, your website is not mobile-friendly.

Besides, the tools also provide crucial data such as the performance of your website. It offers actionable tips on how to optimize the mobile-friendliness of your website.

Conclusion

Ultimately, mobile-friendliness and SEO should go hand-in-hand. Google is making it easier for everyone to know their site needs to be optimized for mobile devices, by awarding higher rankings to sites that are mobile-friendly. After reading this blog post, you have the tools and knowledge to determine if your website is currently mobile-friendly and how to go about improving it's mobile optimization, if necessary. Therefore, keeping up with current trends and optimizing your website for mobile devices is paramount in ranking well with Google search results. It's easy to understand why, since almost 60% of all web traffic comes from mobile devices - so make sure you're catering to those users! If a company or website owner wants their business website or ecommerce store to succeed, they must prioritize Mobile Friendly designs as a top priority.