Google is Changing Search Results for Mobile Friendly Websites
A mobile friendly musician website is a must have for Google and your fans. Google recently started sending out millions of emails to webmasters across the globe. What they are doing is about to entirely change the way that your website ranks on all Smartphone devices and tablets.
Google initially made mention that this change might be coming back in November of 2014, but the recent notifications are a tell-tale sign that the algorithm update is forthcoming. This will either be a blessing or a curse for your music site and now is the time to act before the new algorithm is launched. Your website will either immediately rank higher in smart phone SERPs OR your ranking will immediately fall lower; all dependent upon the mobile optimization of your website(s). If your website is fully mobile optimized, you will only notice positive changes to your rankings on smart phones over the coming months.
Get Your Musician Website Optimized Fully for all Mobile Devices
Its is imperative that your music website include a mobile friendly audio player designed to function on smartphones, tablets and iPads.
If your competitors do not yet have fully mobile optimized websites, you will suddenly and without warning be ahead of them in the SERPs, specifically on smart phone and tablet Google searches. If your website is not currently optimized fully for all mobile devices, you will lose rankings. Google does not want to show your website to users on their smart phones if it’s not mobile optimized, so it is of the utmost importance to make the necessary/recommended changes.
As of writing this, more than 50% of all online web traffic is coming from users on their smart phones or tablets. The mobile Google algorithm update is a major deal for every website owner.
Find Problematic Pages and Fix Mobile Usability Issues
Needless to say, this is a major change that is occurring and one that webmasters in every country and industry must not ignore. If you are in fact reading this, you most likely received a notification that looks like this: Subject: “regarding the mobile usability issues Google found on {domain-name}” Fix mobile usability issues found on “yourdomainname} Google systems have tested {XX} pages from your site and found that 100% of them have critical mobile usability errors. The errors on these XX 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.
Find problematic pages. View a report of the non-mobile-friendly pages found on your site, and the issues discovered. Learn about mobile-friendly design There are a variety of techniques you can use to make your site mobile-friendly. Specifically, look for information about the issues brought up in Webmaster Tools. Fix mobile usability issues on your site On one hand, this is a great thing for the end user because, let’s be honest, how often do you visit a site on your mobile device and find that it looks terrible, doesn’t function properly, and just doesn’t work?
Immediately after the algorithm update happens, you will hop on your smart phone or tablet, perform a Google search and find entirely different results than you would if you were searching from your desktop or laptop computer. Sites that are not 100% optimized for all mobile devices will be penalized in smart phone SERPs immediately after Google puts the algorithm update into effect.
So what do you do in preparation for the update?
Well, the primary recommendation is to follow the provided instructions, figure out how many pages on your site need updating, and if you have the ability yourself or an in-house web development team you should immediately have them redesign your website so that you meet the Google standards for mobile users.
Once your site has been redesigned and is smartphone and tablet responsive, you will need to resubmit your site map to Google through your Webmasters Account. Google will then re-crawl your website and let you know if you have any additional pages in need of updating.
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