Google is Expanding Mobile-Friendliness for SEO Ranking
It’s official, responsive design improves SEO. Starting April 21, 2015 Google will be expanding their use of mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal. With over 50 percent of new searches now coming from mobile devices (tablets, smartphones) it was already important to have a website that is mobile friendly. Now having a site that is responsive (theme or template that enhances the user experience on both desktop and mobile devices by scaling according to width) will rank higher than one that doesn’t. Here is an excerpt from Google’s post:
Starting April 21, we will be expanding our use of mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal. This change will affect mobile searches in all languages worldwide and will have a significant impact in our search results. Consequently, users will find it easier to get relevant, high quality search results that are optimized for their devices.
You can read the full post from Google here.
So responsive design improves seo – Google provides several tools to help see how mobile friendly your site is. The first is a mobile-friendly test on their developers site. This works great if you want to test a few pages on your site. If you want to see how mobile friendly your whole site is you can use your Webmaster Tools account to get a full list of mobile usability issues across your site using the Mobile Usability Report. If you want to more help with making a mobile-friendly site you can read their full guide here.
Google is say that this change in their ranking algorithm would have a “significant impact” on mobile search results. It’s estimated that it will have an impact on 40% of mobile search queries. By comparison the changes from Panda impacted 12% of all English search queries and Penguin impacted 4% of global queries across both mobile and desktop. With the significant shift to mobile devices this will be a massive impact on search – responsive design improves seo may be a bit of an understatment.
