Will Google’s mobile-friendly algorithm change affect your website?

By now you should have heard about Google’s announcement about the change to their algorithm which favours websites that are mobile-friendly (aka, responsive design). The big change will take effect on the 21st of April and is predicted to change the search results page landscape significantly because any websites that’s not mobile-friendly will be penalised for all searches conducted via mobile devices. Exactly how many people actually use their mobile to conduct searches online? Well according to statistics by StatCounter, around 50% of the entire searches online are conducted by mobile device, and that number is constantly growing.

What does that mean for your business though? One of the first thing you need to do is check whether your website is mobile-friendly or not. Google has made it very easy via https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/ where you can just type in your website address and the system will tell you the results in seconds. If you pass, hooray, whoever helped you create your website has done their job by ensuring it catered for the mobile users. If you don’t pass, don’t panic, it’s not the end of the world. As a matter of fact, think of this as an opportunity to review your website (which is most likely a little old) and evaluate whether it is still serving its purpose. If not, this might be the push you needed to give your website an overhaul and ensure it’s doing what it is suppose to be doing (whether that’s marketing or improve client retention).

We will be conducting our own research in a few weeks to see exactly how much impact the Google algorithm change has been so stay tuned for further update on this topic. In the meantime, if you’re need some extra assistance in making a decision or figuring out what the next step should be, don’t hesitate to contact us for an obligation free chat.

Note: all 20-80 Solutions websites are responsive and caters for both mobile and tablets, so if you’re an existing client, you’re in safe hands 🙂