I had a conversation with a very successful restaurateur from Scranton the other day about SEO. He feels OK about the look and feel of his current site, but wanted to know how to get to the top of search results.

We talked about building SEO organically by providing valuable content that real people want to see, but I also pointed out that he has several non-mobile friendly features on his site that might hurt him.  His site looks good on my desktop and iPad, but is off-brand on my iPhone and some of the “features” are pretty clunky.

Then today, our Chief Strategy Officer shared this “Webmaster alert” with me.

“A common annoyance for web users is when websites require browser technologies that are not supported by their device. When users access such pages, they may see nothing but a blank space or miss out a large portion of the page’s contents.

Starting today, we will indicate to searchers when our algorithms detect pages that may not work on their devices. For example, Adobe Flash is not supported on iOS devices or on Android versions 4.1 and higher, and a page whose contents are mostly Flash may be noted like this:”

Basically Google is saying that they will be warning searchers about non-mobile friendly sites before they even click. So even if you are at the top, if the searcher is using a mobile device (and 60% of web traffic is mobile) you are going to get passed over.

Action item: Since it’s getting more urgent every day that your website be mobile friendly, why not give me a call and lets get it fixed before you lose more visitors.

For the full article, click here.