Google recently announced that on the 21st of April 2015, a major change in the way that search results for mobile are provided will take place. Is this something that will affect your website? The short answer to this question is yes, it will affect all websites.

Google are expanding their use of mobile friendliness as a ranking signal. This will affect mobile searches in all languages, worldwide. The aim of this is to ensure that users are presented with search results that are relevant and optimised for the device that they are searching on.

This change, again, reinforces the importance of mobile search and the ever-increasing use of mobile devices in our internet browsing behavior.

Search is still the most common starting point for internet research on mobile. Research carried out by OFCOM suggests that in the UK, mobile (smartphone or tablet) is the primary Internet access device for over half of users at 52%, and 42% of internet page views in the UK are being served to either mobile phone or tablet.

As you would expect, Google is acknowledging this trend and responding to ensure that search results on mobile reflect it.

So, fascinating as this all is, what does that mean for your website?

Businesses who don’t address this issue could see the following:

• A drop in mobile rankings
• Mobile traffic loss
• Loss of discoverability

Ensuring that your website is responsive and accessible on all platforms will help avoid being disadvantaged in Google search rankings by these changes.

Not sure if your site is responsive?

There are free tools available via Google which can check your website for you – otherwise, contact us, quoting your URL and we will check it for you.

Need to know more?

More information on Responsive Web Design and how we can help can be found here.