Mobile friendliness & what’s next in the year 2017?
Billions and billions of users make up for mobile usage in the given era. There are no qualms anymore on potential of marketing through mobile phones. It is the one point of contact between your customer and your brand.
For proof, check the statistics of India as per January 2017 where 79% of the total population is on mobile. Imagine how this would unfold for the rest of the world.
We can highlight in many ways why your website should be 100% mobile friendly; for now we’ll only highlight the main 5:-
- Google prioritizes a mobile-friendly website over a non-mobile-friendly website
- Having mobile friendly pages is now a given best practice
- Your reach will increase manifold because people are on mobile phones more than on their desktops
- It is always recommended by Google Webmasters to make your site mobile friendly
- It adds credibility to your brand & makes you look current
While trying to achieve all of this how does one establish when and at what point is the website completely mobile-friendly? Or when does it need to change something or needs improvement?
Most common and traditional method is to take customer reviews, do test runs, check different scenarios, check insights from analytics on how are your pages being accessed from mobile devices and how are people spending time on your site; to name a few.
What if we tell you that you could now check whether the pages of your website are mobile friendly or not?
Google recently announced that such a facility is now available. They introduced the Mobile-Friendly Test which is now available through API. The Mobile-Friendly Test lets you test URLs from your website using the automated tools. Let’s take an example. You can now monitor important pages of your website so as to prevent any accidental regression. This API runs all kind of tests and returns similar information including the list of all blocked URLs.
To help you get started with ease the documentation has simple samples.
Google’s aim is to make sure the API makes it easier for you to check your pages whether they are mobile-friendly or not, and to sort any such issues faster. We also know that Google search through mobile devices is changing & a lot of focus is on AMPs. We already discussed this earlier about how Google’s SEO index will now be based on mobile & through AMPs.
For now test this for yourself — https://search.google.com/search-console/mobile-friendly
Image/Information Source — Google Webmasters Central Blog & Hootsuite
