If you have received a notice from Google that your website is not mobile friendly and yet you do not have the budget right now to rebuild your website AND you don’t want to lose traffic after 4-21-15, what can you do?
There are a few services available that will scan your existing site and allow you to drag and drop files in their editor to make a responsive website. Even web hosts have gotten into the action with website templates that are integrated into their hosting platforms.
Although these simplified templates do not allow for a rich, interactive, and custom site, they are good alternatives that are relatively easy albeit fairly time consuming to work with.
Some sites that you may want to check out if you are a do it yourselfer are: DudaMobile – has mobile friendly as well as responsive designs WIX – just be careful of the design as not all are really responsive. Shopify has some nice designs to consider Webflow is even a consideration.
Of course if you want greater control over your design and content, or simply do not have enough time to do this yourself, we have a very nice turnkey program for responsive websites for you to check out and try out online.
Make sure you set the viewport for your site to display it properly on multiple devices.
If you have received the Google notice that your website is not mobile friendly and yet you do not have the budget right now to rebuild your website AND you don’t want to have your traffic lowered because of the issue, what can you do?
There are a few services available that will scan your existing site and allow you to drag and drop files in their editor to make a responsive website. Even web hosts have gotten into the action with website templates that are integrated into their hosting platforms.
Although these simplified templates do not allow for a rich, interactive, and custom site, they are good alternatives that are relatively easy albeit fairly time consuming to work with.
Some sites that you may want to check out if you are a do it yourselfer are:
DudaMobile – has mobile friendly as well as responsive designs
WIX – just be careful of the design as not all are really responsive
Shopify has some nice designs to consider
Webflow is even a consideration.
Of course if you want greater control over your design and content, or simply do not have enough time to do this yourself, we have a very nice turnkey program for responsive websites for you to check out and try out online.
You do not want to get email from Google – really! Just this week Google started posting in the Webmaster Control Panel and emailing website owners notifications like this one.
“Google systems have tested 25 pages from your site and found that 96% of them have critical mobile usability errors. The errors on these 24 pages severely affect how mobile users are able to experience your website. These pages will not be seen as mobile-friendly by Google Search, and will therefore be displayed and ranked appropriately for smartphone users.”
Seeing as this site has only 25 pages, that means that Google is in essence saying “you’ve got big problems!”
Earlier in the year, Google warned that they would be evaluating websites for mobile friendliness and they also stated that this notification such as this one in this blog post would be the first step. The second step, Google stated, would be to mark the site in the Google mobile search index as not viewable on a mobile phone. Yikes, that sounds like a soft penalty.
Google also alluded to a third step which to many webmasters such as myself appears to be a organic penalty. Although Google may be slow to take this last action, they are clearly working their plan starting just this past week.
Many legacy websites are simply not responsive designed and are not mobile friendly. The site that received this notification is over 8 years old. If your site was not built in the last two years, expect to be getting notification of problems too.
Nancy McCord’s 2015 PredictionsIt’s getting close to the end of the year and I’m getting the jump on the rest with my predictions for what we will see in 2015 on the Web. Here’s what I see as important for my industry and for business owners to take notice of.
1. The Mobile Web and Google
This whole next year expect to see more activity from Google in regards to refining how websites are ranked based on mobile friendliness. If you at the minimum do not have a DudaMobile website to turn you not so friendly mobile site into one that Google will like, now’s the time to make that move. Better yet is to invest in rebuilding your website using a responsive design which will serve you better in the long run.
2. Mobile Pay Will Be Hot
As all merchants will need to upgrade their swipe terminals to accept the new SIM card personal identifier in credit cards, Brian Shea of Seven Sages and I predict that nearly all merchants will move to the contactless pay terminals allowing greater use of mobile payments with Apple Pay and Softcard. I really like Mobile Pay and predict that this will really change our world in 2015 and 2016. Thanks Brian for the tip on terminals.
3. Organic Listings Will be Pushed Below the Fold on Google.com
Google is continuing to try to keep visitors on their site even longer with the Knowledge Graph and the Carousel. I expect to see Google continue to add even more location specific content on the Google.com page pushing true organic listings even lower on the page and these may actually be pushed below the fold. This will drive more businesses into Google AdWords for visibility. As the lines are blurred even further between paid ads and unpaid listings I expect to see strong growth in Google’s income as more businesses vie for the limited ad spaces.
4. Facebook Will Be in Direct Search Competition With Google
I don’t expect to see this in early 2015, but I would expect to see Facebook launch its own search engine by the end of 2015. I expect to see it branded with personal reviews and friend’s activity, making it a powerful competitor to Google. I am expecting to see developments in this area by late 2015 and early 2016. I feel that Facebook is looking to be more than a social news site and looking to go head to head with Google AdWords but in a unique creative way that will cause huge issues for Google’s market share.
5. Twitter Will Try to Become “Facebook”
In 2015 I expect Twitter to continue to try to attract more readers onto their home page and may actually drop the ability for so many third party apps to post content. I expect to see Twitter try to control scheduling of posts by either creating their own posting scheduling app or selecting only approved vendors. Twitter is looking to innovate and to stay vital, it will need to work to re-invent itself new technology in 2015 or start to lose market share.
Those are my top five predictions for 2015. Do you have any of your own you want to share, just leave them in comments.
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