It’s well documented that mobile search has become increasingly prevalent over the course of 2014, with Google focussing its efforts on enhancing cross-platform marketing. This is highlighted by Matt Cutts’ assertion at SMX West last March that he “wouldn’t be surprised” by mobile queries surpassing desktop queries.

For the best part of 2014, there has been a growing consensus amongst webmasters that creating a mobile-friendly version of their site will soon become a necessity, with talk of google launching a mobile ranking algorithm in the near future never far from marketers’ minds.

That potentially could be realised in the very near future, as Google have sent throngs of notifications to webmasters who don’t have mobile friendly sites telling them to “fix their mobile usability issues”.

According to renowned search engine aficionado. Barry Schwarz, a number of emails have been sent to the aforementioned group of people warning them that 100% of their site’s pages are not mobile friendly and thus, will be “displayed and ranked appropriately for smartphone users”.

Schwarz also notes that Google have usually only notified sites considering themselves to be mobile friendly when they had defects, but that it has alerted all webmasters currently overlooking mobile search is particularly pertinent.

This clearly indicates that a mobile search ranking algorithm is to be implemented soon, with Google’s webmaster tools providing a ‘mobile usability reports feature’ and SERPs showing mobile friendly tags in Meta data.
User experience has long been one of Google’s ranking factors, and forcing smartphone users to view desktop sites on smaller screens is hardly conducive to the accessibility and ease of knowledge absorption that Google is promulgating.

As marketers, negating the needs of a heavy proportion of your audience is plain dumb – why needlessly inconvenience them and risk losing out on leads? Whether you’re seeking to circulate content or sell products, non-mobile friendly content will soon stop appearing in SERPs and on mobile versions of social networks.

eMarketer have forecasted that “roughly 50% of all search’s” are expected to come from mobile, whilst Susan Wojcicki, CEO of Youtube, recently declared that 50% of the ubiquitous video sharing site’s traffic stems from mobile devices.

Get ahead of the game, and reap the rewards of having a strong mobile game – the stage is set for 2015.