Matt answers the question “How important is having a mobile-friendly website for SEO?” This interview was conducted by Steve Fretzin for The Origination Station, the top business development e-training for attorneys.

Transcript:

Steve: Matt, when I think about my website one thing that bothers me is when I look at other people websites and its great on my screen but when I go to my phone it’s all messed up. It doesn’t look right, it doesn’t really work, you kind of have to expand things. What mistake do people make about setting up their website properly so it works on mobile devices?

Matt: You absolutely need a mobile friendly website. It’s now a necessity. Google released its big algorithm update last year that SEO’s call, “mobile-geddon”, which essentially what they started doing is decreasing ranking for websites that aren’t mobile friendly and increasing ranking for websites that are. I was actually in an event at Google’s headquarters last week and they did a presentation and part of what they were talking about was mobile and the trajectory of people that are viewing websites and using Google from mobile devices is skyrocketing. To the point where even older demographics are even using mobile devices. It’s just a necessity – you don’t want have that website where somebody gets to your website they have to zoom in and out on their screen. They really want you to create a good user experience and there’s an application Google released; or a website Google released called The Mobile Friendly Test, where you can actually put in your website into this website that Google launched and it will tell you how mobile friendly your website is. And if you are not passing Google’s test it’s safe to assume you don’t have a very mobile friendly website and then you’ll know the steps to take; could be either making a mobile friendly website or building a brand new website.

Steve: I can see that, because I have done this where I go to a website on my phone it’s just unreadable. It’s unworkable and I just move on to another website that is more mobile friendly and so they just lost the business or lost the call or whatever.

Matt: Right, if you are not creating a good user experience for people they are just going to leave your website and often times you are not going to get those people back.