More reasons to upgrade your website to responsive design

Google offers more incentives to implement full tablet and mobile optimisation. Does your dental website pass Google’s tests?

Google recently announced that they will be adding tags to search results indicating whether the website in question is mobile friendly or not. So the searcher will easily be able to see if you’ve considered all users; desk-top, tablet and smart ‘phone when building your dental practice website.

At the same time, Google announced that they are considering mobile “friendliness” as a ranking factor i.e. actively promoting websites where an effort has been made to ensure that the site is accessible to users on all sorts of devices, whether a large screen desk-top or hand-held. Normally Google does not make this sort of announcement without extremely careful consideration and a certain intent – so it’s usually wise to sit up and take notice when they do.

The “mobile friendly” tags are currently being rolled out into the search results and take this form:

How can you ensure your dental website gains the mobile friendly tag?

Some of the criteria Google will use are:

• no software which is incompatible with mobile e.g. Flash. This automatically invalidates some of the dental animations still being offered by some marketing companies in their website packages.
• readable text – without the need to zoom in
• content is automatically resized to the screen without user intervention
• link spacing – these need to be suitably far apart to avoid “miss-taps” on mobile devices

Other technical criteria e.g. how web code is formatted, will also be used, but hopefully the short list above gives a flavour of just how deeply Google is checking this.

We’ve known for some time that responsive design offers some great usability advantages but this is the first definite indication that it could also be a ranking factor very soon.

If you’re unsure if your website is mobile friendly, check out this free Google tool here.

Another  method to assess website mobile compatibility

Anyone who is serious about their web presence will be using Google Webmaster Tools (GWMT) to check the performance of their website. Google now includes a full section of results about how your site performs on mobile together with some graphical stats. All of Dental Media’s responsive websites pass the mobile usability test, receiving the following notification in Webmaster Tools:

It’s well worthwhile checking in GWMT to see if your site has also passed the Google mobile usability test.

Summary

There has been steady “pressure” from Google and other search engines over the last 18 months, encouraging webmasters to ensure that their websites are truly mobile friendly; not simply with an independent and now outdated mobile site, but by utilising responsive design. It now looks like this advice is likely to be reinforced by actually introducing mobile optimisation as a ranking factor.

If your dental website is already built to the latest responsive standards, you look set to benefit. If not, now is the time to consider an upgrade to a fully responsive framework. Your users will appreciate better usability and Google will give you credit too.

All of our website designs at Dental Media are offered with a full responsive option which is proven to pass all of Google’s quality criteria. If you would like to know more, please get in touch on 01332 672548 for a no-obligation discussion.