Mobile website ranking – How does it measure up?
With all the talk that Google had with mobile-only how come desk top ranks better than their competitor’s mobile website.
Google has claimed if your content isn’t mobile-friendly you won’t rank as well. Yet when you search certain key terms the sites displayed on mobile are not typically mobile friendly. Why is that?
Although Google has warned webmasters over the years they need to rank well having a mobile website, it has been concluded the mobile-only index is not in effect. So what does it really take to rank in Google? Mobile friendly or is it some other factor?
Am I saying you should not have a mobile-friendly website?
No, that’s not the answer, but there are more important factors to ranking than a mobile-friendly website.
So mobile friendly aside, It’s obvious that Google still considers domain authority in content above mobile-only websites.
In most cases, you don’t have to worry about mobile friendly because most sites are built on a CMS that typically has a responsive design built into the template. But if you have an old site that is sitting on a hard-coded framework, it may not be worth moving to a mobile-friendly design right now. Should that concern you? The answer is if you cannot afford to move your site to a new framework you should consider those areas that Google looks at for ranking signals like content and link building. I mean let’s face it, those signals will always improve a sites ability to rank whether they are mobile or not.
But here we are talking about mobile and we haven’t even talked about where the traffic comes from. Many industries today still rely on desktop to drive a large percentage of their traffic. Mobile represents a small factor in their searches. In that case, you really have more time to consider desk vs mobile because most of your desktop traffic won’t touch mobile anyway.
So let’s backtrack, If you don’t have a mobile site yet, then first look at your traffic and see where your traffic comes from. If 25 % or less of traffic comes from mobile then I would probably take my time considering what kind of mobile framework to move my site to in the future.
Let’s talk about traffic just a bit more. If you look at your analytics and see your mobile traffic is over 25 %, its time to look at moving your site to a mobile-friendly framework.
If your site is large and you do not want to move it, you could create a mobile version only showing your most important pages. If you have time and the money you can rebuild the entire website on a mobile framework.
In conclusion, it is not imperative to have a mobile-friendly site right now. I do believe, however, that mobile-only index will arrive sometime later in 2018, so if you have desktop version only, then you need to consider future plans.
Stuart Morris
SearchTalk
