MOBILE-FIRST INDEXING: how its related to Seo

Google mobile first indexing

We live in an interconnected world where it feels that smartphones are everywhere; with people engage in their screens at every turn.

In the USA, UK, and Canada, to name a few, mobile devices amount for over 60% of total internet traffic; in fact, mobile internet usage surpassed desktop usage back in2016 With these statistics in mind, it’s no surprise that Google is moving to Google mobile first indexing.

 What is mobile-first indexing?

What is Google Mobile First Indexing

We all know that Google’s indexing bots, also known as spiders, crawl the web. So far, the importance was on desktop internet usage, which meant that these bots gave priority to desktop versions of web pages. Now, they will prioritize mobile-optimized content while crawling the web.

Will the change impact page ranking and SEO?

It is possible that, If you are using a responsive site, or if you have a properly optimized mobile version, you should see little change, if any.

Google announced its plans for mobile-first indexing back in November 2016 and they will be implementing it gradually across 2017.

While it might seem simple on the plane the key issue with the move to mobile-first indexing is that desktop sites have been around for so much longer than mobile sites, and the amount of metadata for mobile is not as rich. In other words, the mobile web has much less content and links due to the head start that the desktop has had.

basically, Google has to develop new signals and metrics that are going to fill in this gap in order for the change to be faultless A good example of this is Google mobile first indexing. the new page speed measurement process that is planned for mobile sites the desktop page speed is not relevant to mobile.

How should I prepare for mobile-first indexing?

First of all, Google has already focused on mobile-friendly search engine updates, so this move just makes it more official. If you haven’t optimized your blogs and sites for mobile so far, your site performance is already anguish.

Now, regarding the solution, the first and most obvious answer is to optimize for mobile. There are a number of steps you can take to do this. The simplest way to improve your website and its functionality is to use a dynamic responsive design to the way your website looks, depending on the screen size, resolution, and operating system.

This isn’t a new development, and most CMS platforms offer responsive themes and layouts. In addition, you have simple tools at your disposal to establish if your site is mobile-friendly.

Of course, you can still use separate versions of your website or even keep on using a desktop-only site, since the new algorithm will index it just fine, but it could potentially be marked down in SERPs due to poor mobile performance. So one should better be understanding google mobile first indexing.

So, except major design changes, what else can you do to improve your ranking and seo

Use Structured Data

Structured data is an on-page mark-up that allows crawlers to fully understand what your website is about. It also enables search engines to produce rich snippets in search results and potentially push your website higher up in SERP results. Structured data testing tool is a free tool from Google that allows you to validate and test structured data in websites.

Although it is important, this structured data can be removed from the mobile version of your site to increase site speed and adhere to mobile-first indexing.

Content

If your site has only a desktop version verified in the search console, make sure to also add and verify your mobile site. It’s also recommended to use a robot.txt tool to see if your mobile site looks healthy to a Google bot (Google indexer, or spider).

While this is a major change, a standard practice still applies to producing SEO-friendly content & know google mobile first indexing.

There are a few little tweaks that you can make to your content that could improve your mobile performance, from the point of user experience. For the most part, it isn’t about any particular technique, but how you think about your content.

One of the first questions you should ask yourself is this: is browsing your website on a mobile device a good experience?

Sure, long and informative articles are important, but that 5000-word article can look really fearful on a smartphone. Using short paragraphs with a lot of white space will make your content easier to read when it’s scaled down for smaller screen sizes.

You should also consider breaking up your copy with images and infographics. Video and audio content also works great on mobile, as impatient browsers won’t stick around to read a bind of text. By varying the content on a webpage, whether it’s video or audio, you’ll appeal to more users as well as encouraging spiders to crawl your site.

What is the future

To anyone following SEO trends, mobile-first indexing is not really news. Google has been focusing on increasing and improving the mobile experience for years now.

Mobile-specific updates are slowly changing the online landscape; the introduction of AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) allows users to access your content and speed and app streaming allows you to use apps without actually downloading them to your device.

Luckily, improving your website for google mobile first indexing isn’t complicated for the average Digital Marketer. Simply focus on creating great content and keep the user experience at the center of all changes you make to your desktop and mobile sites.

Ultimately, optimizing your blog for mobile is a matter of common sense as most of your audience is slowly migrating there, and their shift in marketing trends in the past few years.