Last week Google started rolling out special labelling, identifying websites that are mobile friendly:
These new labels only appear when you do your search on a mobile device (which makes sense) and at this stage it doesn’t appear to affect your actual ranking. I expect it will affect your click-through rate though – more people will probably click your listing if it’s labelled this way.
This makes sense given the growth in mobile traffic to websites in recent years. Don’t be surprised if Google does make this part of their ranking algorithm in the not too distant future.
We’re seeing an average of about 1/3 of website traffic via phones, and we have a few clients for whom that figure is over 1/2!
If you want to check your own website, you can use Google’s tool here.
UPDATE: I just checked back with the official press release and it looks like having a site that is not mobile-friendly could start impacting your search results:
We see these labels as a first step in helping mobile users to have a better mobile web experience. We are also experimenting with using the mobile-friendly criteria as a ranking signal.
So: if your website isn’t already, better get that attended to now.