Google Changes Mobile in 2012 Home

In that last few months of 2011, Google started openly talking about how it wants to see Mobile Websites performing in its search index and mobile ad platform. If you are a small business owner who relies on your website for fresh leads/contacts/customers then you need to take note!

3 main points to consider:

#1 Flash Based Websites – November 2011 – Google said it would limit ad serving to mobile devices if advertisers directed people to landing pages with a lot of Flash content. Basically, your adverts will NOT be shown!

#2 Google AdWords Customers – September 2011 – Connecting to mobile optimized landing pages will now be a major factor in determining ad placement. Google is publically stating that if your website is NOT optimised for Mobile – then YOUR AdWords costs are going to be HIGHER!

(Google is spending Millions of pounds developing their AdWords platform for Mobile Search – as of the 17th January 2012 your campaigns now have WiFi targeting, and targeting by mobile operating system version!)

#3 Smartphone Users – December 2011 – Google announced a brand new spider that they are adding to the Googlebot line up – this bot is for Smartphone related content and is named “Smartphone Googlebot-Mobile.”

In PLAIN English: Google is NOW actively crawling the Internet for local small business websites that can be viewed easily on a Smartphone and then storing these pages in it’s separate Mobile Search database. …now is the time to get your Mobile Friendly Website launched!

Google is making some basic recommendations:

- You should NOT have to zoom in to read the text and interact with the page!

- Images should be no wider than 250 pixels

- Pages should be optimised for mobile and so load faster than your existing site

- Interaction with buttons rather than hyperlinks, although a few hyperlinks are OK

- NO use of Flash technologies

- 61 Percent of users are unlikely to return to a mobile website that was hard to access from a phone.

- Mid-2011 Google said that 79% of top advertisers do not have a mobile optimized site – and that figure is higher for small businesses!

Google is serious about the use of Mobile Search!

It is worth repeating this key point: “Anytime you have to zoom in to see the details of a website – it’s NOT Mobile friendly!”

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