Internet usage on mobile devices has been gaining on desktop computers for years. In 2018, mobile usage is expected to top 51% of all internet access. It should come as no surprise that Google has been watching these trends and has begun rolling out its response to the shift from desktops to mobile devices, namely with the mobile-first indexing.
Having a mobile version of a website that is responsive has been a factor in Google’s algorithms for some time. But up until now, the desktop version was Google’s primary concern when crawling and indexing a site. That has changed as Google now analyzes the mobile version of websites first, with desktop sites only being indexed first if a website does not have a mobile version.
This new algorithm has already been applied to websites all over the world, with more added each day. To ensure that your SEO strategy and your website’s rankings do not suffer when this new algorithm crawls the site, follow these steps to make sure that Google favors your site’s content.
1. Optimize your mobile website.
According to Google, if your mobile and desktop versions are identical, this new algorithm will not affect your website contents’ rankings. That is because the rankings that Google awarded your desktop site will be the same as your mobile site content.
However, if your mobile site is not responsive and lags or fails to load completely on mobile devices, this will hurt its rankings. Whether your mobile site and desktop sites are entirely separate or identical copies, your business needs to put a focus on optimizing page speeds and load times to keep these issues from hurting your site’s rankings. You can test your website’s mobile speed and rendering with Google’s Test My Site tool.
If you can’t speed up your website pages load times to less than two seconds, consider implementing Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) for important content that is likely to be consumed on mobile.
2. Migrate all high-quality content from your desktop site to your mobile site.
If you have two versions of your website, make the mobile version the only site. The mobile version of your business’ website has previously featured only portions or snippets of the content added to your desktop site. It’s time to change that. Your mobile-friendly site will soon be crawled first and given preference in first-page rankings, before the desktop version. If a significant portion of your content, including text, images and videos, are missing, they won’t get indexed. This can be a significant blow to your SEO efforts and can affect your search engine ranking.
Before you simply dump your company’s content from your desktop site to the mobile version, you will still want to check to ensure that the images, text and videos are able to be crawled and indexed. Be sure to include alternate attributes for images and video in case they are unable to be displayed due to a slow connection or other issues.
3. Check your metadata, schema markup and social metadata.
If you are not doing so already, it is time to start adding metadata, including titles, meta descriptions and schema markup to your sites. Titles and meta descriptions are common, but you may not be familiar with schema markup. These are additional fields that help Google and other engines know how to categorize your content. Your mobile-friendly website should also feature the social metadata, such as Twitter cards or Open Graph cards.
4. Ensure server capacity can handle the uptick in additional crawls.
When Google’s algorithms crawl websites, they are fetching data from the website. Your site is not shut down while this occurs, which means that other web visitors could be on your site at the same time. Even though Google has crawl rate limits in place to reduce the effect that their analysis has on other web surfers’ experiences, if your site doesn’t have enough server capacity, lagging can occur. Make sure your mobile optimized website can handle all search engine bots as well as visitor traffic. Check your current server capacity and settings to make sure that lagging does not occur when your site is crawled by the new algorithm.
5. Add your mobile-optimized website to Google Search Console.
Google Search Console is a free service that allows website owners to monitor their website’s performance and rankings in Google’s search results. You can use this free service to add new content to be crawled, monitor content performance, maintain your site and more. To see how Google’s latest algorithm will affect your site’s performance and to find out whether your mobile site is experiencing any issues, be sure to add your site’s mobile version to your Google Search Console account.
Preparing Your Website For Google’s Mobile-First Indexing
With mobile internet usage on the rise, ensuring that your business’s website is optimized is important. With Google’s new mobile-first indexing now taking the increase in mobile internet access into account, it is even more important to focus your efforts on best practices for search engine optimization.
If your business’s site has not been seeing the traffic that you want, now is a great time to work on improving your search engine optimization efforts.