In the world of SEO, Mobile-First Indexing has brought a huge change. If you want to know about this change, the first thing you have to understand what Mobile-First Indexing is and how SEO is related to it. This can be explained to you by an SEO services provider.
What is Mobile-First Indexing?
It is not difficult to understand the concept of Mobile-First Indexing. When determining how well a webpage should rank, Google will look at the mobile version of a page. The fact is that this applies to both mobile and desktop website search results. This is different from the Desktop-First Indexing in which the desktop version of a webpage will initially be checked by Google and the mobile version will be considered later. Mobile-First Indexing is mainly utilizing the mobile version of the page content to move forward as the majority of people use their mobile to access Google.
How to Make Sure Your Site is ready for Mobile-First Indexing?
A website must be ready for Mobile-First Indexing. Today website owners are making their sites mobile-friendly as mobile is extensively used for accessing Google. To make sure a website is mobile-friendly, a number of factors should be taken into consideration. The following are some of them:
- The design of your website should be responsive. It is of utmost importance. The site will be more accessible to the target customers if it is responsive. Whether it is a desktop or mobile phone, the content should be the same. A website should be responsively designed so that mobile users can easily access them anywhere on the go. You must contact a responsive website design company for this.
- The content should be of the same quality on the desktop site and the mobile site. This is because high-quality content is given much value by Google. Keeping the content quality the same, you can make some optimizations in the mobile content as it will immensely affect the impact of Mobile-First Indexing on the mobile site.
- The creation and thinking on Mobile-First Strategy are very important. Focus on mobile first and think later about desktop. This should be in all aspects such as website design, development and others. A website design company can prove very effective in doing this.
- It is very important to serve the same structured markup for both mobile and desktop version. The structured markup across mobile and desktop versions and its equivalence can be verified by sites. You can use the structured data tool which is provided by Google in order to do this. In this tool, the URLs of both versions are typed in order to compare the output.
- The notification is sent by Google through the Search Console when the site is being switched over to mobile first index. Many site owners may wish to check out the crawl activity of Google before and after the switch is being done. The way the search engine bots across a website and check out the way they get there, log file data needs to be monitored. It will be immediately noticed if there is increased activity by smartphone agents and site owners will be alerted. These changes in patterns surely give a general idea although they may not be completely conclusive.
- The factor that Google is able to index your mobile site must be confirmed by you. By using the ‘Robots.txt’ you can do this. If Google isn’t able to access your mobile site, it will be of no use. For this reason, this tool is very important. You can take help of a website development company in for this.
- Among the major factors taken into consideration by Google for Mobile-First Indexing, fast load speed is going to be an important one. A site has the chance to get down-ranked in Search Engine Results Pages if it doesn’t get loaded at a fast speed. The site owners need to rethink their position if they don’t think that loading speed is going to affect Mobile-First Indexing.
- The capacity of the host servers must be enough so that they can handle the increased crawl rate.
- You need to look into the use of pop-ups, if lead generation is very important for your website. The size of the pop-ups should be responsive as per device. The frequency of the appearance of these pop-ups needs to be considered and the closing button should also be given importance. As in a few occasions the pop-up doesn’t allow to access of the site’s required content, it irritates the mobile user a lot. The best web design company in Kolkata will be able to do this.
- CSS, JavaScript or Images shouldn’t be blocked. The smartphones of the modern days are a lot smarter than the normal computers. There are faster processors and extended memory in smartphones these days and they are more capable to deal with complex user requirement. Make sure to show them everything if Google Bot can handle it as this will help Google to categorize your content and rank it appropriately.
What is the Impact of Mobile-First Indexing on SEO?
How much Mobile-First Indexing can impact SEO is not a complex matter to understand. A company providing SEO services can make you understand this. It will soon become a very familiar subject. The fact that Google has rolled this out only a few days should be kept in mind. It will be treated as an experiment by Google in the short term. Therefore, it must not be felt by you that there is a lot of pressure on you for making changes.
Conclusion
There is constant change in the SEO landscape. Tomorrow it will likely be something else just as today it is Mobile-First Indexing. The steps which can be taken by you are briefly described here. Remember that you have a lot of time to make the required changes as Google has only started to roll this out. Doing the right things the right way matters the most. It will rather prove harmful to you if you end up making a few expensive SEO mistakes.