With the Google update, you’ll see a noticeable change in search result indexing.

At a hearty sixty percent, mobile device usage accounts for the majority of time spent on digital media consumption. Last year mobile app and web usage grew by fifty-two percent and seventeen percent, respectively, with desktop usage hardly growing. More than half of all time spent on the web is from mobile device users. With that, for the first time ever, time spent online with mobile devices exceeded the time spent online with desktop devices.

There are now more mobile web users than desktop web users — smartphones and tablets are now the primary means upon which to access the Internet. With you and almost half the world using the Internet at any given time, the biggest mobile search provider and mobile platform provider, Google, will be modifying its web indexing accordingly, “Starting April 21, we will be expanding our use of mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal. This change …will have a significant impact in our search results.”

Google wants your site to be easily accessible on any device.

Although this Google update applies mostly to mobile search queries, it’s a high-impact change. Some say it’s going to have more clout than the Panda or Penguin algorithms. With the surge of mobile web usage, you’d be hard-pressed to disagree with the prediction — meaning all businesses with an online presence should adjust to the upcoming Google update. Here are three main features accompanying the change:

1. Page-to-page assessments: web crawler bots will now assess a website’s mobile-friendliness on a page-to-page basis. It’ll rank higher those pages that are optimized. No penalties come as consequence from non-optimized pages, but it’d do nothing but better your rankings to make your entire site compatible for mobile devices.
2. Dynamic, real-time change: a spokesperson tells that the Google update’s algorithm will score and index your site’s changes anytime on April 21^st and after. So you don’t have to convert your site to a mobile-friendly one by the 21^st. As soon as Google picks up on your site’s changes, your site will benefit from the update.
3. Sites partnered with an Android app will rank differently: already set in motion, search queries that have an Android app associated with it will now appear more prominently in search results, given the device-user has the app installed and is signed into the app.

Google provides guidelines and tips on how to make your website mobile-friendly. To ensure there are no problems with your website’s mobile accessibility, Google recommends using Google Webmaster Tools. If you have an Android app partnered with your site, make sure to deep-link it, index it, and verify your app’s site to Google Play. To outplay your competition, get ahead of this Google update and start optimizing your site now. If you need help doing so, to receive a free web evaluation, contact us.