The short answer to this question is yes. In fact, a recent announcement by Google is making it even more imperative that websites are mobile compatible.
These changes to Google’s search results algorithm basically mean that if a site isn’t mobile friendly then it will be penalized in the results. This reflects the fact that, on mobile searches, non-mobile sites are a poor user experience and Google is simply trying to provide the best experience it can for its users.
It is important to note that this only affects mobile based searches. So just what does that mean? According to a recent comScore report, mobile (smartphones and tablets) accounted for 60% of all digital traffic. Assuming search traffic follows (if not leads) that trend, then its pretty darn important.
60% of the people searching for your business are searching via mobile. So if you don’t have a mobile friendly website, you run the risk of falling further back in a lot of searches.
What can I do about it?
Mobile friendly is all about size. You don’t want to display something build for the widescreen monitor sitting on a desk somewhere, on a phone. On a tablet – that’s debatable. But definitely not on a phone.
Option 1) Create new mobile friendly templates for the most important parts of your site and set up scripts that detect mobile devices and mobile traffic to these pages.
Option 2) Create a new website utilizing responsive design. Responsive Design is simply a technology for displaying content in the space that is available on the screen it is being displayed on. It also isn’t a simple stretch of a single column. Modern website building techniques allow for responsive design to flow across an almost infinite number of columns.
Option 3) Create a separate mobile friendly website with just the necessary data and set up redirects to this.
This last option is probably the fastest and there are lots of services out there offering to do just that pretty inexpensively. But it isn’t a complete solution. For a basic website with just a little contact information and static product information. This is probably a decent option. But any site with dynamic content such as inventory or blog posts like this one, will definitely suffer as this dynamic content will not be on mobile and will therefore be penalized for search results of that content.
Options 1 and 2 offer the most complete results.
Matt