With the importance of your site being mobile friendly for both SEO and a good PPC experience, we tend to use a lot of tools and analytics to try to determine how mobile friendly your site is.  In some cases, it is obvious just from visiting the site, but in other cases, we find ourselves comparing bounce rates and site speeds and using a number of methods to determine whether we are being helped by having a “mobile friendly” site.  With Google making a point of telling  us you will be hurt in rankings for having a poor mobile experience, and no longer letting you officially avoid advertising to mobile completely, it is very important to be sure that you are mobile friendly.

Ranking Boost for Mobile Friendly Sites

Google is now testing a “Mobile Friendly” designation and a ranking boost for mobile friendly sites.  This is sort of putting a positive spin on the penalizing sites for having a poor mobile experience that they’ve already talked about.  However, what looks like the best thing that came out of this is Google providing a tool that will tell you yes or no if you have a mobile friendly site according to them.  Theoretically, in the Google environment, you know longer have to guess at this based on a conglomeration of other user statistics.  This sounds like a great tool and I would highly recommend everyone use it.

Some Bugs to Work Out

I do have to say that upon jumping to use this great new tool, I tried it on a site and was told a site that I felt was definitely mobile friendly came back as not friendly.  I then tried another site and came back with the original site.  The second time it said I was mobile friendly.  There was probably less than two minutes difference in time between these tests on a yes or no type tool and I got both answers.  So that is a little unsettling. I ran it two more times for a total of four tests on the same page and I got two friendly and two not friendly results.  Clearly some bugs to work out but on the right track.

The tool can be found here. I just warn you that you may want to try it a few times and see what it says.  For the time being, keep looking at speed tests and bounce rate but hopefully they will get this figured out soon.

 

Summary
Mobile Friendly SEO: Google Gives you a Testing Tool
Article Name
Mobile Friendly SEO: Google Gives you a Testing Tool
Google Certified Partner and SEM Specialist
Google has now provided a new tool to tell if your web page is mobile friendly, and plans to add a designation for "mobile friendly" sites that give it a ranking boost. Unfortunately, some bugs still to work out.
Jeremy Skillings