Does Having a Responsive Mobile Website Affect Your SEO?

Gone are the days when mobile devices were simple, wireless phones that were only used to make calls. Today’s smartphones are nothing less than hand-held computers that perform an ever-increasing range of tasks, from playing music to family calendars, from gaming devices to photo studios and Internet browsers. As business owner, you already know the importance of cutting-edge advertising, customer service and product placement.

If you have an online component to your enterprise, you have probably also become an expert at making your website rank highly on the search engines. However, if you have failed to take smartphones and tablets into consideration, you will quickly and irrevocably begin to lag far behind your competition. To keep ranking high in the search engines, you absolutely must have a mobile-responsive website.

This needs to be one of your most urgent priorities, and it isn’t just because more and more consumers are getting smartphones and using mobile tablets. While that should be reason enough in itself, the reality is that Google is now ranking mobile-friendly websites higher in the search engine when smartphone users conduct a web search.

Google, long an astute observer of existing trends and a maker of new ones, has made no secret of the importance it places on mobile devices. Some of their bots already operate as mobile devices when they search the Internet. What’s more, they have made mobile-responsive websites their recommended modus operandi. Finally, Google has created mobile friendly test tool that enables anyone who is interested to obtain statistics about worldwide mobile usage, a phenomenon that continues to grow by the day.

Make no mistake about it: Google is watching. If they find that your website is not mobile-responsive, you will soon notice that your rankings have taken a hit. While it might be disturbing that Google has found your business’s site lacking, you should be even more worried that there is an ever-increasing number of customers who conduct most of their web searches using their tablets, iPhones and other smart devices.

Do you really want to be left out in the cold when they do these searches? We suspect not. If you want to make your site compatible with smartphones and other hand-held devices, use a conversion platform such as dMobilized or Duda Mobile to make the change. The downside to these applications is that you will ultimately end up with two websites; a desktop and a mobile-friendly one. Perhaps a better solution is to use the mobile plug-ins found on the content management system (CMS) you already have, i.e. WordPress, Joomla or Drupal. In these cases, you can also access additional features that make your site even friendlier to the mobile user.

Whatever method you choose, it is a virtual certainty that you must embrace the idea of having a responsive mobile website. Making a small time investment to accomplish this task will ultimately pay for itself many times over. Your customers, both current and future, will expect nothing less.