Have you ever found something that you felt like was too good to be true, like a secret that you can’t believe you knew before? That happened to me this week. During a conversation with my friend who specializes in Website design and SEO, we discussed the importance of having a mobile friendly site. Way back when smart phones were just being released, you didn’t need to worry so much about having a mobile-friendly site. Your site still pulled up on your phone’s website browser and that was just good enough.
Until now.
Google announced in April that they have “tweaked its algorithm for mobile searches to favor sites that look good on smartphone screens, and penalize sites with content that is too wide for a phone screen and text and links that are too small.”
This means that “Mobile-friendliness is just one of over 200 different “signals” that Google uses for ranking its results”.
But that doesn’t mean that this should be ignored. We are clearly approaching a “mobileggedon” where most people are browsing on mobile devices than desktops and laptops. In the last 12 months, mobile browser usage has nearly doubled, and in the past 24 months has more than tripled.
That is nothing to ignore.
I did some research online on how mobile friendly my own site is and then how I could build my own mobile site.
The first step: How to see if your site is Mobile Friendly
Visit Google’s Mobile Friendly Test site. Enter your URL and see results in just a few seconds on how mobile friendly your site is.
You’ll either see Awesome! This page is mobile-friendly. or Not mobile-friendly.
When I looked up my own site, I got the dreadful ‘Not mobile-friendly’ message, so I immediately began to explore options on building my own mobile site, and also find out how to build my client’s a working mobile site. I’m all about learning something new – every week if I can! I built my own website in order to teach myself WordPress. It didn’t take long for me to find the company DudaMobile.
The second step: Building your first mobile site
My suggestion to build your first mobile site is to use an existing program that can help you each step of the way. DudaMobile is a site that offers a mobile site building wizard and instantly pulls information from the content on your existing website. I was able to build and customize my own mobile site within one day.
Now my site is one step closer to being Google Search friendly AND I am confident of how it looks on any mobile phone. Big and instant relief.
Costs and features:
DudaMobile offers to give you a free account where you can build your own custom mobile-site with many features, including a contact form, social media integration, images, and redirect from your WordPress site.
If you don’t have a WordPress site, they offer directions on how to enter the redirect coding to your website. A free account is ad-supported and the URL is not customizable. If you’re not a fan of ads on your site or would prefer a custom URL, they make it an affordable $7.20/month (for annual subscription) or $9.99 if you want to pay month to month. You also receive access to more interactive features like GoogleAds, Click to Call, Maps, and more.
Currently, I’m bringing the importance of having a mobile friendly site to the attention of my clients and together we’re building their mobile sites with SEO Tags and all, headed in the right direction to making their sites mobile friendly and keeping their sites current with Google’s algorithms, a very important and crucial thing.