Hi everyone, this is Dean Hawker with Conversion SEO. Today I want to address the question of whether or not your website should be mobile optimized. Months and months ago, Google put an enhanced emphasis on websites being optimized for mobile. It took a little bit of time for the data to come back as to how much of an impact it's going to be. This is being recorded in September 2015. We've had quite a few months how to actually see what's happening and sure enough if your site is not optimized for mobile, there have been some very clear indicators that your website is not going to rank as well.

                                   
A couple of quick tips and just an overview of what this means and what it means to be mobile optimized and a quick breakdown of actually what's happening with your website when it is optimized for mobile versus optimized for a regular web browser, maybe on a PC or even a tablet. Just because you can pick a tablet up and move it, just like a laptop, doesn't mean that your site should render for mobile or a tablet. It's mainly focused on cellphones and smartphones. Really what is happening here is if you look at my crude wireframe drawing of maybe a traditional website with a couple of columns and maybe some content down the middle.

                                   
You can mainly see it's just built in blocks of some sort, but this is the way that your website would present on a traditional browser like Chrome or Safari or Firefox or anything like that. When you optimized your site for mobile, what happens is it takes these blocks and it just basically stacks them. As a user hits your site, your URL, if you're optimized, what's going to happen as that they're flipping through their phone, all your content is going to stack and it's going to be easier to read and easier to navigate. Who should actually really be concerned about this? I would put first priority on local businesses.

                                   
If you're a local business and you have a website that is rendering for traditional browser and it's not reformatting for a mobile phone, what's going to happen is all of your text is going to shrink down and be very hard to read. If you have any action buttons on your site, they're going to be very hard to access for your user. Getting them to stack properly is going to be a really important thing to have happened, especially if you're brick and mortar, if you're service business where people come to your place of business. It's not usually a super painful thing to actually take a site and make it optimized for mobile, but it does depend how old your site is and what type of foundation it has.

                                   
The first thing you should do actually is you can test your site for mobility. You can go to Google and you can test. Just plug your URL into their testing tool and it's going to think for a couple of seconds and then it's going to return back a rendering of what your site looks like on a mobile phone. It's going to either tell you pass or fail. If you passed, you're good to go. If you fail, it will give you options and suggestions as how to fix that. Even beyond that, it will tell you how you can contact a developer if you don't have one to actually make that transition so your site is optimized for a mobile, so it's an important thing.