Last week Google made a big announcement that might affect you. What it boils down to is this: if your site is not mobile-friendly, your rankings on Google’s mobile search will suffer.

We’ve been harping on the need to give your mobile visitors a good experience, and this announcement only solidifies our position.

What does this mean for you? Well, if your site is already optimized for mobile, you’re in good shape. Bravo, and no further action required. If your site is NOT optimized for mobile, your site will not show up as well in a Google search from a mobile device as it will in a search from a desktop or laptop.

Whether this matters to you is somewhat a question of what device your visitors tend to access your site from. However, we’d argue that it’s best to be optimized for mobile regardless – after all, why damage your rankings on mobile search if you don’t have to?

There are three main options for making your site mobile-friendly, which we’ve look at before in this blog. Briefly, these are:

1. Create a completely separate mobile version of your site (m.example.com)
2. Use a plugin (if on WordPress) to detect if the browser is on a mobile, and serve up a streamlined version of the same content
3. Use responsive design

Option 1 is the most labor intensive, and also the least desirable route. If you do take this approach, however, be sure not to commit one of the cardinal sins according to The Google. That is: no matter what URL your visitor enters on their browser (example.com/foo, example.com/bar), the mobile site always reroutes them to the home page (m.example.com). This graphic is straight from Google:

Option 2 is better, but still not ideal.

Option 3 is far and away the best choice. Be sure to read our previous post about responsive design if you need a refresher.

Is your site up to Google’s mobile challenge? If not, contact us for help!

Click to read the complete official announcement.

Photo Credit: cogdogblog via Compfight cc