Is Your Site Mobile Friendly?
Included with today’s What’s Up Wednesday, not only do I share the importance of having a mobile friendly site, but also recent events with my online and personal life.
Checking for a Mobile Friendly Site
If you are not aware by now, Google made a major shift yesterday in the way it ranks website listings based on whether a site is mobile friendly or not. If your site does not show well on a mobile device, then your site will take a hit (loss) with it’s Search Engine Rankings.
To find out if your website or blog is considered “mobile friendly”, you can test it out by visiting this link HERE (https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/).
As you can see in the graphics below, The Smart Affiliate website IS mobile-friendly.
Also, Google lets you “see” how your site appears on a mobile device if you don’t have one as shown below.
Why is having a Mobile Friendly Site important?
Some marketers continue to underestimate the importance and power of Google. As more and more people use mobile devices, the perception is that Google search is not needed nor used.
But this is the furthest from the truth. Google continues to be on the cutting edge of search engine technology including social network interactions and mobile devices that represents 61% of all online searches – mobile and otherwise.
And most likely the other top search engines (Bing, AOL, Yahoo!) will follow suit if they haven’t already.
But most important, many of the visitors who come to your site are doing it with a mobile device. If they have any difficulty with seeing your site because it isn’t mobile friendly, they will leave faster than they arrived.
This will hurt your site’s bounce rate (still important) and lose potential customers from buying from you. Most likely they will not come back to your site – ever.
And most importantly, mobile device usage has exploded especially over this past year. I accidentally discovered this when running a FB boost ad earlier this year. Out of the 571 views received, 90% were from mobile devices (which is much higher than the 27% from about a year ago)!
What to do if Your Site isn’t Mobile Friendly?
There is still time to make changes to your website to make it “responsive”, that is mobile-friendly. If you use WordPress as your main platform, then you can just get a different theme – one that is responsive.
Out of 7 of my active websites, 4 were not mobile-friendly (still working on the last two)! My biggest issue was that 3 of my sites had a moving slide background that I liked which changed pictures behind the home page.
The responsive themes I am currently using for my mobile-friendly sites, didn’t allow me to continue with this feature.
So it took me about a day to find another theme online that had the basic features that would allow me the ability to setup a moving background. And I found a few, but selected just one.
Also, I located a plugin that added this feature to the responsive theme, so now I am in the process of changing over these sites with positive results – although it is taking some time to customize the look and feel.
Shifting Gears – my personal life change
To be honest, since my heart attack – it has taken more out of me than I first realized. Since the end of last month, I have taken a step back to review everything I am doing, my online business and otherwise.
My doctor informed me that the heart attack I had experienced kills 1 out of every 3 who undergo this type of heart attack. So I am both fortunate and grateful to be around. Also it changed the way I look at what is important.
Because of it, I have been making changes to my web business along with my life focus. I haven’t done as much of the things I did beforehand including writing as many article posts or reviews, haven’t finished my digital product, email campaign, or sales funnel.
I enjoy being online, seeing what others are doing, sharing information and being part of a larger community – so I won’t be giving up on what I am doing, just that ill be doing it differently. 🙂
Final Thoughts…
If you have a website or blog, you will want to make sure that it is mobile friendly. With the explosion of mobile device usage online, you don’t want to miss out and lose customers.
There is still time to make the necessary changes, but you don’t want to delay it any longer. 🙂
