Is your website not mobile-friendly? In the words of Morbo from Futurama, you may be doomed.

Doooooooooooomed!

Melodramatic hooks aside, it looks like Google is finally ready to make mobile usability a significant ranking factor after introducing mobile-friendly labels on organic listings on smartphone and tablet devices two months ago. Webmasters all over web have been receiving usability reports from Google the past couple of weeks, indicating what needs to be done to optimize websites for mobile search. These reports contain the following information:

• Number of pages that have critical mobile usability errors.
• Google’s guidelines on how to implement a mobile friendly website and mistakes to avoid.
• Resources for websites that are built with a CMS such as WordPress, Magento, or Joomla.

Last November, Google had mentioned that it would be testing mobile-friendly criteria as a ranking signal within search results. Considering more people use mobile devices to search ubiquitously these days, it comes as no surprise that it looks like Google will soon give smartphone and tablet optimized websites preferential treatment when it comes to rankings. Websites lacking a rich user experience can also be penalized in the case of structural issues, faulty redirects, and smartphone only errors.

If your website is currently not responsive or optimized for mobile devices, it might be time to consider implementing a new theme so that you can avoid losing out on mobile traffic from search engines. The initial investment in a mobile-friendly design will pay dividends in the long run and not just for SEO: with the amount of mobile users increasing on a month-by-month basis, you want to ensure that all traffic from email marketing, search advertising, and social media apps don’t encounter functionality issues after landing on your website.

The time to embrace mobile is now…are you ready?