If your site does not yet utilize responsive design, then the Google mobile-friendly update could have a major impact on your site’s rankings.

On April 21st, Google has announced that it will begin rolling out a new mobile-friendly search engine algorithm update that is designed to target websites that are not mobile-friendly.

Major Search Engine Update Will Be Bigger Than Panda and Penguin

If you want to avoid losing your rankings in the search engines, it is important that you update your site as soon as possible in order to get your website up to current standards.

The announcement regarding the mobile-friendly update was originally announced in February via a post on the Google Webmaster Central blog.

In this blog post, Google explains how it will begin to use mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal and the update will affect sites in all languages.

Mobile-Friendly Websites Will Rank Higher

In addition to the ranking updates, Google will also begin placing a “Mobile-Friendly” tag on search engine results to designate the sites that are user-friendly for mobile users.

It is estimated by comScore, that up to 60 percent of digital media time spend in the United States is done via a smartphone or tablet. Therefore, this update could have a major impact in the majority of incoming traffic to your website if your site is not mobile-friendly.

Is My Site Safe?

If you want to check if your site will be safe when this update takes place, you can use the Mobile-Friendly Test.

This tool will review your site in order to determine if the layout is mobile-friendly. This is the easiest way to make sure that your site is ready for the update.

If you want to get additional recommendations, you should log into Google Webmaster Tools where you can request a Mobile Usability Report.

If your site has already been set up in Google Webmaster Tools, you may have received a message from Google informing you of the update and changes to your site that need to be made. Follow the instructions to make the required changes before the update.

What Changes Should You Make to Your Site?

If you know that you need to make changes to your site, you should start now before the date gets closer. This will allow time for the search engines to crawl your site before the update is rolled out.

Invest in a Responsive Design Website

Now is the time to update your website so that it utilizes responsive design. Responsive design websites are different from traditional website designs because they are intended to provide an optimum user experience regardless of the device being used.

Responsive design websites also utilize one-set of coding so that your SEO efforts are not diffused by the use of multiple domains or subdomains. This is why responsive sites are favored over simply adding a mobile version of your website.

Unfortunately, there is no easy way to transform most sites into responsive sites, so your best bet is to contact a web designer right away. If you are more tech-savvy, you can go ahead and download a responsive design theme and install it on your CMS.

However, you will still need to work on the optimization of your site in order ensure that the site provides a good user experience for visitors and that the best practices for SEO are still being followed on every page.

Revise Your Content So That It Is Appropriate for Mobile Devices

In many cases, you will also need to trim down the content that appears on your new site so that it is digestible for mobile users. Text-heavy websites are cumbersome to navigate on mobile devices.

Therefore, you should take time to figure out what is really important to your users and adjust the content accordingly.

Speed Up Your Site

Getting your site to load faster is a change that can help your site as this update rolls out. Mobile users tend to be even more impatient then desktop users when it comes to waiting for web content to load.

If you want to improve the speed of your site, consider switching your hosting provider and building your site on a CMS engine, such as WPengine, in order to boost the performance of your website.

In addition, hiring a developer to create your new responsive website will ensure that the code is clean, which can also help your site to load more rapidly.

In order to avoid having major problems after this Google mobile-friendly update has finished rolling out, it is important that you implement these changes as soon as possible.

If you need additional recommendations on how to find a web designer to upgrade your site, we can help.

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