The SEO industry has been talking about Mobile-First Indexing for some time and now we have been welcomed with its presence. Back in 2018, this new concept was rolled out and we have been working with it ever since.
There is a bit of confusion surrounding it but we are going to be talking about what it is and how you will need to adapt your SEO Strategies to accommodate it.
What is Mobile-First Indexing?
Mobile-First Indexing is exactly what you think it is. This simply means that when Google crawls your website it scans the mobile version first before looking at the desktop version.
This means that every website on Google needs to be optimised for mobile usability and search, Google’s Algorithm will be penalising a website that isn’t mobile-friendly because it doesn’t comply with its strict guidelines.
Moz has created a good visualisation of how googles crawl bots will work now with Mobile-First Indexing as opposed to desktop-first indexing. See their breakdown here.
How can I optimise for Mobile-First Indexing?
Optimising your SEO campaign for mobile-first indexing shouldn’t be too difficult! If you’ve already been optimising your website for mobile usability before these developments then there shouldn’t be anything to worry about.
The main factors you need to take into account when looking at the mobile website are:
Content
When working with mobile optimisation you need to take into account the size of the screen and the size of the text so users are able to read the text accurately. Some people will reduce the amount of text on mobile websites but this can also have detrimental effects on your SEO progress.
Meta Data
While it’s not needed making your Metadata shorter for your mobile version can be useful for the smaller space provided by Google’s mobile search. Note that you will still need similar information and to include your keywords in the data as they are still needed.
Site links
Make sure that you can optimise conversion rates with every opportunity, making sure that number and email links work on mobile is a great way to improve your mobile conversion rate.
2019 is going to be another year of challenges and there are going to be a lot of changing in the SEO world but this is just one that we think you need to know about before moving forward in your campaigns.
Mobile-First Indexing probably won’t be the most important thing on your list to get done but it is definitely one that needs to be checked off before too long or it could come with devastating SEO effects. We have also talked about some other upcoming SEO changes that we think could be important this year in one of our earlier articles, take a look at it here.
