It's no secret that people are obsessed with their cell phones; nine out of ten U.S. adults own a cell phone and 60% of those people use it to regularly browse the web. Therefore, it's becoming increasingly important for websites to be mobile friendly. With it's recent Webmaster announcement, however, Google just forced everyone's hands: to avoid being penalized in its search engine results, your website must be optimized for mobile use.
That's right, all of your hard work to increase your SEO could soon be thrown to the wayside.
Google Algorithm Updates
Google has a very strong eye for trends and constantly makes updates to its algorithm to ensure that the best search results come up. And as of April 21, its algorithm will increase the rankings for websites that are considered mobile-friendly--or, as defined by Inbound Marketing Agents, "responsive to different screen sizes, properly configured and able to be viewed on multiple devices."
Google has provided users with a great tool that they call the Mobile-Friendly Test, which allows you to enter a URL to analyze and see if it is considered mobile-friendly by the Googlebot. Additionally, if you do a Google search on your mobile device, sites that are considered mobile-friendly will be tagged as such within the SERPs.
