Mobile is changing the world. Everyone over the age of 8 seems to have a smartphone, and everyone at work is tied to their phone between meetings, on the way to meetings, during meetings.
So making sure you’re serving up a mobile-friendly website is no longer a nice-to-have for down the road; it’s a have-to-have for today.
Google has announced that at the beginning of May they will give mobile friendly websites even more ranking priority than before.
Klemen Kloboves, a Google Software Engineer, wrote, “Today we’re announcing that beginning in May, we’ll start rolling out an update to mobile search results that increases the effect of the ranking signal to help our users find even more pages that are relevant and mobile-friendly.”
Need more convincing? Here’s two stats:
- As of 2014, there are more mobile phones and computers sold than desktops, according to Morgan Stanley.
- In 2015 in the US, adults spent more time on digital media than on desktop minutes, 51% to 42%. (Source: KPCB)
It is not expected that this update will be as significant as the initial update on April 21, 2015. Quality content will still be the uber-factor for Google in determining rankings. But they’re clear now that if two sites are equal with equally great content, the mobile-friendly site will always appear ahead of the site not optimized for tablets or phones.
