With constant changes in the world of the Internet, it does not surprise any more that there is a rising number of updates, alternations, guidelines and adaptations that are not seen as the most user-friendly ones at first. Even later, some changes have been better to have never happened because their supposedly good impact turned out to be more than average and non-existent, or purely negative.
Just remember all those updates on Facebook and YouTube – the advertisements and promoted features that were supposed to make these sites more appealing and interesting to new users, and yet still relevant to the old ones. However, not everyone appreciated these alterations being forced on them – some web pages are more personal than the others and every user feels that he or she should be the person making the decisions about the changes.
The same goes for the business websites and one of the most controversial recent updates, Google’s new mobile-friendly one, has not been appreciated unanimously. What does this update include, how does it change the world of small business and what are the changes that the web pages are about to experience?
The Mobile Friendly Change
In short, what Google has done is change the algorithm it uses to search through pages on the Internet and rank them by their key words and visibility. At the beginning of March, this search engine announced that in the future a key factor of searchability will be the presence or absence of web site’s mobile-friendliness.
So, starting from April 21, Google is looking into whether your site has a mobile friendly version or not and rank it based on this factor. All of this is announced as the “major change” and these words are feared by many – when Google announces something huge and important, nobody can know what this will mean practically.
The Impact
While this mobile friendly change does not matter a lot to a number of companies and while many people still do not realize what it will include, it is more than obvious that this will impact not only Google and the world of search engines, but pages by many companies, as well as people who are involved in this process.
From web designers to SEO experts and professionals who are looking into making their client as visible on the Internet as possible. So this change will affect not only the invisible and the abstract world of the Web, but real people with real jobs as well. And this may be the tipping point for some of them – Google’s change will have an impact on numerous lives at once and it will surely change the world of SEO and web programming as we know it.
What to Do?
What this means for owners of online businesses is that they have to adapt as soon as possible. So, tweak your websites to work on mobile platforms and hope that you will remain as relevant and visible on this new search algorithm by Google as you used to in the past.
Therefore the most important and, in the end, the simplest solution you can think of is to go mobile.
By announcing the change about seven weeks in advance, Google has basically given business owners three options:
- Adapt your Internet presence to a mobile context
- Hire a professional agency that will follow these updates or
- Become irrelevant when it comes to Google’s searches, which will ultimately mean the slow end of your business.
When it comes to agencies that are hired to follow and handle these updates, this may be the best option and an online strategy that you should look into. Leaving the job to the professionals will not only ensure you a stress-free transition, but also include complete care.
The Next Step
Provided that everyone interested is already informed about this change – and all companies will surely do so, for their own sake – what can be the next step in this process? Every website will be added a mobile version and stay in the race on the Google’s search list, and those that defy this will be avoided and missed by a number of visitors.
In time, mobile-friendly websites will become the new standard and, after some more time, everything will return to the way it used to be: countless websites fighting to be as visible as possible, only now in the mobile-friendly context. The competition will be smaller and only those that adapt will endure.
The Final Touches
Some of the other things you can include in your new strategy to stay afloat in this updated system are a better and improved SEO strategy and a more advanced linking tactics. The key may easily be the interconnectedness of desktop and mobile versions of your websites – despite all these new Google-induced changes, the majority of people will still remain loyal to the old types of websites and keeping them included in your new marketing strategy will be as vital as acquiring new visitors via the mobile-friendly approach.
If you are interested in reading more about the impact of this recent update, check out this post from Moz.