Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

On April 21, 2015, Google made a massive update to their SEO algorithm and was clear that they’d be handing out manual penalties to websites that didn’t abide by mobile best practices. Don’t panic just yet—Google doesn’t expect every website to run out and develop and app or otherwise become their “best” mobile ready self. Really, mediocrity is what’s being expected, but that’s still going to be a challenge for the vast majority of websites. Now that experts are saying that the majority of American web surfing will take place on mobile devices by 2017 (and we’re almost there already), Google is simply being proactive in making sure the best websites are still dished up to surfers.

However, the algorithm is a change that’s going to impact all languages of all websites that appear in Google searches. What does this mean for content marketers? It’s time to focus not just on the quality of your online content, but its mobile-ready factor. You might be doing everything “right” from a content perspective, but that doesn’t mean much if almost half of users can’t readily access it. In order to appease Google’s algorithm and avoid a penalty, consider these your new content marketing rules for a very mobile ready world (and marketing campaign):...