Google has been strongly pushing all webmasters to have mobile-friendly websites. The first major push happened back in April of 2015 when Google officially made mobile friendliness an SEO ranking signal. Now Google has announced that starting May of 2016 they will start rolling out another mobile ranking signal in an effort to help mobile users find better, more relevant, mobile friendly websites for their searches.
Today we’re announcing that beginning in May, we’ll start rolling out an update to mobile search results that increases the effect of the ranking signal to help our users find even more pages that are relevant and mobile-friendly.
For those of you who already have a mobile-friendly website that successfully passes the Google Mobile-Friendly Test, and adheres to the Google Webmaster Mobile Guide, this will only improve you’re rankings and you have nothing to worry about.
Everyone else really needs to start taking mobile users into consideration and start working on a mobile-friendly website design. Now if you choose to completely ignore having a mobile-friendly website, it doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going to be shoved to the ends of Google. If you have good content that is extremely relevant to a specific search query – you’ll still maintain you’re ranking … for now.
And remember, the intent of the search query is still a very strong signal — so even if a page with high quality content is not mobile-friendly, it could still rank well if it has great, relevant content.