One the 21st April 2015 users of Google on mobile devices will now only see results pages that contain mobile-friendly websites. In simplistic terms, if your website is not mobile responsive, it wont appear on Google for searches conducted on mobile.

On the 26th February 2015, Google announced that it was expanding their use of mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal, to ensure that its users get relevant, high quality search results that are optimised for their devices. You can read more on finding mobile-search friendly results here.

Similarly, on the 18th Nov 2014, Google announced that it was beginning to inform mobile users which websites are mobile friendly. As a result, this is likely to have a significant impact on click through rates,with mobile friendly websites being higher. Earlier this year Google announced that it was beginning to penalise websites that did not provide a positive user experience in it’s search engine results pages. In particular where a sites serve content to desktop users accessing a URL but show a 404 error page to smartphone users. Read more on changes in ranking for smartphone search results.

The consequence of both of these actions, clearly suggest that any webmaster should now ensure that their websites are 100% mobile friendly or find themselves slipping down the results pages on mobile devices.

As we outline above, mobile and tablet devices are now the primary devices used when it comes to internet browsing. This is why it is important to ensure that you have a customer and seo website design that satisfies both your website users and the search engines.