Mobile first indexing is hitting the virtual market as businesses battle it out on the Google results page. If you’re one of these business owners, you may be confused about what mobile first indexing even is and why it’s so important for your business’s growth.
What is mobile first indexing? Let’s learn what it is and why it’s important to SEO strategy as more users search on their mobile devices.
Mobile First Indexing: What Is It?
To put it into layman’s terms, mobile first indexing is Google’s new algorithm that rewards sites with excellent mobile design. More and more people are using their mobile devices to search the web. So it’s important that your site works just as well on a phone as it does on a desktop or laptop.
This is to say that it’s mobile first indexing, not mobile only indexing. If you only have a desktop site available, it can still be ranked on the google results page. However, your best bet for increasing your numbers is to develop an easy-to-use, functional mobile website.
How Mobile First Indexing Affects SEO and Rankings
Sites that are mobile friendly will start getting first dibs on the Google search results page. This means that you and your business are going to get the most traffic sent to your site if it has a great mobile interface and is optimized for SEO.
Unsure of your current SEO ranking? Sites like pixaura.com offer free SEO website audits that will show you the overall SEO health of your page. Starting there and then moving on to web design is going to be your best bet to optimizing your site.
Best Practices for Mobile First Indexing
Lucky for you, Google has posted its own guidelines for how to get your mobile site up to snuff in time for their mobile first index rollout. If you want a quick and easy idea of what to do, we’ve compiled some mobile first guidelines for you.
- Structured Data and Metadata. Make sure to match both the structured data and metadata of your desktop site to the mobile version. They don’t have to match exactly; in fact, it’s more beneficial to have shorter titles on mobile versions.
- Make sure that the content on your desktop site flows nicely on the mobile version. You may need to remove or replace some images and videos that don’t function well on a mobile device.
- Follow best practices for images (high-quality, supported formats, and alt-text) and videos (supported formats, easy-to-find spots within your site)
- Page Speed is vital to customer service and high rankings on mobile first indexing. Use online resources to double-check just how fast your pages are loading and what you can do to speed it up.
Prepare for the Future
Fortunately, Google is still fine-tuning their new mobile first indexing algorithm, so you have time to make the necessary changes to your mobile site. Get ahead of the competition by optimizing now so that your business gains tons of new traffic by being first on Google’s results page.
If you’re having trouble with web design, we can assist you in making your mobile site beautiful and user-friendly.