If you’re a loyal user of Google Analytics, like the Digital Marketing Team here at eMagine, you might have received an email earlier this week with a “March 2015 Product Update.” The masthead image within this email featured a cell phone, with the first new feature mentioned in the first paragraph referring to three new “Mobile App Analytics” reports now available within Google Analytics. If you’re familiar with the news that on February 26, 2015 indexed mobile apps began to influence search results, and with the phrase “Mobilegeddon,” this email must have seemed incredibly timely.

What is Mobilegeddon? Mobilegeddon is the phrase that has been coined to describe the day that your website’s level of “mobile-friendliness” begins to matter to Google. On April 21, 2015, Google will officially add “mobile-friendliness” as a worldwide ranking factor. If on this date your site is not found to be “mobile-friendly” in accordance with Google’s mobile specifications, the rankings and search engine visibility that your website currently has could substantially drop, hence, the apocalyptic nature of the phrase.

Thankfully, many of the clients eMagine works with on an ongoing basis have chosen to have their WordPress websites built responsively. Responsive design is Google’s recommended design pattern, and allows a website’s design to “respond” appropriately to whatever screen size it is viewed on. Responsive design also allows your site’s SEO to transfer between devices, as all URLs and content remains on your website.

If “responsive design” is a phrase that is unfamiliar to you, or if you built a website with eMagine several years ago and are on the EzEdit or Joomla CMS, we would recommend that you check your website’s level of mobile-friendliness via Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test tool as soon as possible. You can also access any mobile issues that might be present on your site within your Google Webmaster Tools accounts by clicking the “Mobile Usability” option within the “Search Traffic” section of your internal left side Webmaster Tools navigation.

If after checking for mobile-friendliness, you are met with a series of mobile usability issues, don’t panic! You still have time to create and initiate a plan to get “mobile-friendly” to meet the April 21st deadline. This plan could include the launch of a responsive version of your site, the launch of a mobile site, or the task of addressing each of your mobile-friendly issues, one by one, as quickly as possible.