Google's Mobile Friendly Update

If you're a small business that relies on "free" traffic from good search engine rankings, hopefully you've heard about Google's upcoming "Mobile-Friendly" algorithm update. Supposedly beginning on April 21, sites that are not mobile friendly will not do well in Google search results on mobile devices.

As far as I can tell, desktop searches will not be affected for now. But people are now searching as much on their mobile devices as they are on desktops, and this trend is only growing. This is no doubt especially true for local businesses when people are on the road trying to find a local restaurant or any solution to a problem at hand.

I opened this year with a blog on the need for having a mobile friend site, and this drives home the point. If you're not ready for mobile traffic, you won't be getting much from Google. So have you developed a mobile friendly site?

Being ready means either having a responsive site (once that automatically adjusts to a device), or a separate mobile site, optimized for mobile devices, which automatically shows up on those devices (in place of the main website). If you don't have this kind of solution in place, you can no longer afford to wait on making it happen. And if you need a hand, I hope you'll get in touch.

Of course another way to make your business mobile friendly is by having a smart phone app, which doesn't have to be expensive and can let you reach customers on a regular basis with simple "push notifications."

Digital marketing is a phenomenal opportunity for businesses to market on budget and in a way they can measure. And going mobile is a central part of doing this today. So how are you going mobile? And what questions do you have about doing so?