How Google rewards you

Everybody is happy when costs go down and profits go up. If your website is mobile friendly, meaning that all content displays properly on mobile devices, Google ranks your website higher.

The higher your web page ranking the higher you come up in the list of search results when someone searches for your products or services which ultimately means more calls and more profit for you.

Furthermore, if you do online advertising with Google, a higher page rank will mean that you also come up higher in the list of paid ads that display in the search results. A higher page ranking means that when you receive your credit card bill you will get a pleasant surprise. You bill will be lower! You will pay less for the same amount of advertising the higher your page rank is.

How it works.
Here’s how it works. Google’s pay per click advertising is a system where you only pay when someone clicks your ad and visits your website. All advertisers bid for advertising space on Google search result pages similar to E-Bay except you are bidding for a higher placement of your ad.

When your pay per click ads are setup in Google Ads you enter a maximum cost that you are willing to pay each time someone clicks on your ad and visits your website.

For example, if you sell athletic shoes, you might set a maximum cost of 50 cents per click.  If a competitor sets a maximum cost of 51 cents per click, then their ad will display higher than yours. However, if your competitor’s maximum bid was 25 cents per click then you would come up higher in the search results. Your cost would be only 26 cents per click. Google only charges you the lowest cost that is higher than you competitors maximum bid and lower than your maximum bid.

Now imagine that in the same scenario as above, you do not have a mobile friendly website and your page rank is 4. Your competitor has a mobile friendly website and their page rank is 8. Let’s say that your maximum bid is set for 50 cents and your competitors maximum bid is set at 30 cents. Google will calculate as follows.

Competitor Page Rank = 30 cents X 8 page rank = 240

Your Page Rank = 50 cents X 4 page rank = 200

You can see that you competitors page rank is higher than yours even your maximum bid was much higher than theirs.  They will come up higher in the search results and you might be on the 10^th page of results and no one will ever see your ad.

In practice it is a bit more complicated than that. There are a number of factors that determine your page rank. Google does not make its page rank algorithms publicly available but they do advise some of the factors involved in their page ranking. Having a mobile friendly website is high on that list for obvious reasons.  Most searches are done on mobile devices so Google is not going to rank a site that cannot be viewed properly on a mobile device very high.

For more information on how you can update your website to be mobile friendly and other tactics you can use to increase your Google page ranking please contact us.