If you’re nerdy like us, you may have heard last week that Google is beginning to roll out mobile-first indexing when crawling websites and deciding when and where to display them on search result pages.

What does that mean for your practice?

That’s a fancy way of saying that if your website is not mobile-friendly (meaning it doesn’t look good on a phone), those websites that are may leap you in search results on mobile devices. It’s something we’ve been shouting on our megaphone for a while now, and Google has finally validated it.

Here’s what Google said:

“To recap, our crawling, indexing, and ranking systems have typically used the desktop version of a page’s content, which may cause issues for mobile searchers when that version is vastly different from the mobile version. Mobile-first indexing means that we’ll use the mobile version of the page for indexing and ranking, to better help our – primarily mobile – users find what they’re looking for.”

We know that for a large majority of our clients, a little over HALF of their website traffic comes from mobile devices. The above post which appeared on the official Google Webmaster Central blog signifies the next push of the search giant politely saying, “If you want to show you up, you have to use mobile-friendly design.”

Now, Google assures us the sky is not falling, and there is no “mobile-first index” (yet) that is separate from their main index – but it may be coming sooner rather than later.  

So, if you don’t want to lose ~51% of your website traffic (and potential patients)…

Here are 3 things you can do right now to stay one step ahead of the game:

Step 1

Don’t panic. First, check to see if your site is mobile-friendly in Google’s eyes using their official testing tool here (it takes about 30 seconds).

Step 2

If your site is listed as mobile-friendly, you’re good! If it isn’t listed as mobile friendly, now is the time to panic (just a little).

Kidding. Sort of. That just means it’s time to start planning for a new site so you aren’t penalized and to help ensure you don’t fall off the front page of Google search results when current or potential patients are looking for you (Quick joke: Where is the best place to hide a dead body? The second page of Google! Get it? Because no one ever looks there for ANYTHING. EVER.).

Joking aside, the best thing you can do is be proactive and encourage your webmaster to make all of your content mobile-friendly.

Step 3

If you want to find out if your site is up to par, or discuss how you can make your site mobile-friendly, contact us and we’ll be glad to schedule a no-obligation call to give you some direction on how to improve your site.

A new website can help drive more patients to your practice. We’ll show you how.