Tips and Tools to Ensure Your Website is Mobile-Friendly

I think we can all agree on the importance of a website to a business as a channel for lead generation, sales, branding, awareness, education and more. The days of people calling a business as a first point of contact are long gone; people want to search online when it’s convenient for them. It used to be enough to have a website for your online presence, but with more people now performing searches on their mobile devices than on a desktop devices, being mobile-friendly has become a necessary extension of your business.

In fact, being mobile-friendly has become so important in the eyes of Google that in May 2016, they released a second major mobile-friendly update to their algorithm to give more weight to the mobile signal. If your website isn’t mobile-friendly, it may have gotten demoted. If your website is mobile-friendly, chances are that you can still learn some new things about your website to increase your mobile friendliness by using some of the free tools which I’ll describe in this blog post. I frequently use these tools when I do a quick SEO audit with someone.

Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)

Let’s briefly talk about Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP). AMP is the latest initiative that has been launched to make the web more mobile-friendly. AMP is still in its infancy but major search engines such as Google and Yandex are heavily pushing this initiative so make sure to get familiar with what it is and how it can support your overall search engine optimization strategy.

In short, AMP is a stripped-down version of web pages that load faster on mobile devices than non-AMP pages. On October 27, 2016, I had the pleasure of speaking with Jeremy Green of Endo Creative about this initiative. Jeremy and his company help customers create websites that are optimized for mobile search and he shares a ton of great information in the video. Check it out right here:

Like it or not but the mobile-friendliness of your website is now a ranking signal in Google’s algorithm and it will affect how your site performs in Google search results. Sharpen your digital marketing skills by attending one of our upcoming in-person or online SEO classes.

Once you start to implement AMP on your website, make sure to use the Google Search Console AMP testing tool, the browser-based Validator tool or the Chrome AMP Validator Extension to check if everything is working as it should.   

Google Webmasters Mobile-Friendly Test

The Google Webmasters Mobile-Friendly Test tool lets the user know whether or not a website is optimized for mobile devices. Though, don’t get too excited if you get an “Awesome! This page is mobile-friendly” message in bright green. There could be some major issues that affect how your site gets ranked in mobile searches and I’ll discuss next a tool that will give you additional information.

Google PageSpeed Insights Tool

I’m a big fan of Google’s PageSpeed Insights Tool. As you can see from the image below, the tool will give you an actual score (mobile and desktop version) and it will also tell what and potentially how to fix issues:

Search Engine Optimization Website Audit Tool

If you’re looking for a tool that takes a look at the mobile-friendliness of your website and also the overall search engine optimization performance of your website, then I invite you to use our complimentary SEO site audit tool.

In a minute or less, you’ll receive an 8-10 pages report that shares a ton of information, including:

• Page Speed Analysis
• Url Analysis
• Title and Description Tag Analysis
• Images Analysis
• Analysis of Top Keywords
• Heading Tags Analysis
• Page Content / Copy Analysis
• Page Code Analysis
• Social Media Analysis
• Mobile-Friendliness Analysis
• And much more

What’s Your SEO Score?

Enter the URL of any landing page or blog article and see how optimized it is for one keyword or phrase.

Conclusion

Technology and the web change all the time. Search engines need to update their algorithms accordingly so make sure that your website is mobile-friendly; it simply can’t be ignored. Our SEO training classes are a great way to stay up-to-date and I invite you to learn more by following our LinkedIn SEO Training Showcase page or by reaching out to us today.