The numbers of mobile internet users are increasing rapidly and so has the need for mobile friendly websites. Users will find it irritating when they come across websites that are not responsive and do not show up well on smartphones and tabs. They might also stay away from browsing those websites when they seem them again while googling on smartphones. Before, the real issue was that the people did not have a choice to identify from the search results on their smartphones on which websites were mobile friendly and which were not. So most of the time they might not be happy with the output of the search results, especially when they come across websites that are not at all mobile friendly.
Last week, Google has come up with a new feature for mobile users, which will help them to identify the websites that are mobile friendly and they can visit the websites based on that. The new feature is yet to be rolled out completely, but is available to a large percentage of geographical locations as of now. The feature is simple and is just a label named “mobile-friendly” that comes along with the search results. This will really help the users to visit websites that are mobile friendly and get a better browsing experience.
As per Google, there are various criteria that can make your website eligible for the “mobile-friendly” label. Here are some of the criteria that are taken into account by Googlebot to make your website eligible for the “mobile-friendly” label.
1) A website that avoids software that do not work with mobile devices, eg. Flash.
2) The text that is displayed is readable without zooming on mobile devices.
3) Avoid unwanted horizontal scrolling or zooming to view the content.
4) The links are placed with sufficient spaces so that a user can easily tapped the desired links.
So if you make sure that your website follows the above points, then you can consider your website eligible to be marked as “mobile-friendly” in the search results on mobiles. Since majority of the users loves to visit mobile friendly websites, the chances of your website getting more clicks will be higher if your website is marked as “mobile-friendly” in the search results. This will increase the overall organic traffic to your website and more over if your website is mobile friendly, it will also send out a positive signal to Google. Ultimately, the mobile users are growing steadily and in the near future the traffic from mobile devices will overtake those coming from desktop computers and making your websites mobile friendly will increases the chances of getting better and quality organic traffic from mobile devices.
This new feature by Google is rolled out in my country and am sharing a couple of snap-shots as examples. Hope that it will be rolled out completely by this week and provide a better user experience to mobile users globally. Once it is rolled out, you can reduce the chances of visiting websites that are not mobile friendly and prevent unwanted frustrations.
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