Gone are the days site owners do not worry about the user experience and provide whatever they think is good for users. With mobile becoming major source of advertising income it is ultimate need for site owners to offer mobile friendly site to attract advertisers. Google initially introduced mobile friendliness tester as an optional choice where webmasters or site owners can check and improve the mobile compatibility and improve user experience on mobile devices. But from April 21st 2015, it is not an optional choice but mandatory for site owners to comply with mobile friendliness test in order to compete well in the search. Google sent out an informational message that the search algorithm henceforth will consider the mobile friendliness of a site.
Google’s major source of income is online advertising with mobile devices contributing more than 40% of that revenue. So from Google’s point of view this is a real need to force people to provide mobile friendly data instead of requesting them. But for a site owner this is a task to ensure the compatibility to retain search ranking. Here we discuss how can you monitor mobile friendliness of a site and the tips to improve the same.
Monitoring Mobile Friendliness of a Site
Login to Google webmaster tools and navigate to “Search Traffic > Mobile Usability” section. You will see the pages having problem with mobile crawlers are listed there with usability error. Check out the issues and start working on resolving them. You can check the live status by clicking on the page links or use Google mobile friendly tester tool.
How to Improve Mobile Friendliness of a Site?
There are few ways to improve the mobile view of a site.
Use Responsive Themes
Responsive or fluid themes are one simple solution to improve the compatibility of a site in all devices whether it is a tablet or mobile or PC. The elements are auto adjusted to suit the available view ports and provide the same content and look across all devices. This is a good idea so that a user can switch between mobile and PC any point of time without feeling a difference. Think of choosing a responsive theme or change your rigid theme to a responsive one to improve search engine ranking on mobile devices.
Using Plugins
If you use CMS like WordPress there are readymade plugins to convert your desktop site to a mobile site in few clicks. The basic features are free with the plugins with additional option for upgrading. If you are not happy with your current long running site then these plugins are very useful for conversion without spending much time on changing the whole site or theme.
Some site builders like Weebly offers free mobile site builder with basic features which may also help in improving the mobile friendliness of a site.
Using Third Party Solutions
The last option is using third party solutions like Dudamobile to provide a custom redirected site for mobile viewers. Generally this is a cumbersome task of aligning all content for mobile viewers and setting a redirect.
How to Check Google Mobile Friendliness?
With time passing by Google already changed the mobile search results to indicate the compatibility of the site. Below the example of how a Google search in a mobile looks like now:
This is an initial step from Google before completely dropping of those unfriendly sites from search results. Check your site right now and take corrective actions before you get affected.