Mobile-First Indexing – Everything You Need To Know!

In March 2021, Google played an ace named “Mobile-First Indexing“, giving the SEOs new chapters to cover.

As we all noticed that Google is putting mobile priorities over the desktop, with the constant rise in the number of users on mobile google has finally termed “Mobile-First Indexing” making mobile users their favourites.

But what does that mean for your website? Well, it does mean a lot. If your website isn’t mobile-friendly then you might be on the edge of getting wiped out.

For preventing that to happen, let’s learn what is actually mobile indexing, its effects on SERPs and how you can turn the change favourable for you.

Let’s Get Going!

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Mobile-First Indexing: Know The Meaning

Who can explain Google’s Update better than Google himself:

“Mobile-first indexing means Google predominantly uses the mobile version of the content for indexing and ranking. Historically, the index primarily used the desktop version of a page’s content when evaluating the relevance of a page to a user’s query.”

Simply put, Google is catering to its user base on mobile by rewarding websites that deliver a fantastic experience because most of the searches are conducted on mobile devices.

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What are the significance of the 100% Mobile-First Indexing update?

The significance of moving to 100% mobile-first indexing is massive, as many businesses in the past have focused on making a website for desktop taking mobile as the second thing. For some businesses (like B2B) this makes sense as the centre of their user base still comes from the desktop.

But that doesn’t change the mood of Google. Moving forward if your website ain’t mobile-optimized or worse, if your website doesn’t have a mobile version, your organic traffic can face a drastic drop down or in the worst case, you could’ve gotten wiped out.

Below are the best ways suggested by Google himself that can help you thrive after the mobile-first indexing update.

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Best Practices For Mobile-First Indexing

Let Googlebot access and render your content

Make sure Googlebot can access and render the content and resources on your mobile page.

On both the mobile and desktop sites, use the common meta robots tags. When your site is enabled for mobile-first indexing, Google may fail to crawl and index your page if you use a different meta robots tag on the mobile site (particularly the noindex or nofollow tags).

When a user interacts, don’t lazy-load primary content. Content that needs user involvement (such as swiping, clicking, or entering) will not be loaded by Googlebot. Make sure Google can see the stuff that has gotten lazy-loaded.

Allow Google to crawl entirely. Several resources have different URLs on mobile than those on the desktop. So it is important that you make sure they disallow directive ain’t hindering the path of Google bots.

Keep Content Same On Both Mobile And Desktop

It’s so important that the mobile and desktop sites have the same content. If the mobile site has less content than the desktop one, you must optimize that and make sure most of the content matches both.

You can employ a different design on mobile to improve user experience (for example, shifting content into accordions or tabs); just make sure the content is the same as on the desktop site because the mobile site accounts for nearly all indexing on your site.

WARNING: If you want your mobile page to have less content than your desktop page, you should expect some traffic loss when you enable mobile-first indexing because Google won’t be able to obtain as much information from your website as before. To save space, consider putting material into accordions or tabs instead of eliminating it.

Keeping the headlines exactly the same clear and comprehensible as they are on the desktop sites is highly recommended. As the content is the same in both, the changes in layout can cause trouble to Google while connecting them.

Maintain Your Structured Data

Make sure that structured data is present on both versions of your site if you have it. Here are a few things to look into:

Keep an eye on the structured data, as they must be the same on your mobile and desktop site. Start with Breadcrumb, Product, and VideoObject structured data if you have to prioritise which types you add to your mobile site.

Train Data Highlighter on your mobile site if you’re using it. Check the Data Highlighter dashboard for extraction issues if you’re using Data Highlighter to supply structured data.

Make both versions of your site use the same metadata.

Make sure both versions of your site have the same meaningful title and meta description.

Need Of Better Placement Of Your Ads

Allowing advertisements to affect your mobile page ranking is not a good idea. When showing ads on mobile devices, adhere to the Better Ads Standard. Ads near the top of the page, for example, can take up too much space on a mobile screen, resulting in a poor user experience.

Optimize Your Visual Content

Keeping Track Of Images

Ensure that your mobile site’s photos follow image best practices. We recommend, in particular, that you:

High-resolution pictures are required. On the mobile site, avoid using photos that are too small or of a low resolution.

For images, choose a supported format. Don’t utilise tags or formats that aren’t supported. Google, for example, can index.jpg pictures in the <image> element inside an inline SVG, but our systems can’t index a.jpg image in the <image> tag inside an inline SVG.

Don’t use URLs that change every time the page When it comes to photos, avoid using URLs that vary every time the page loads. If you use URLs that change frequently, Google won’t be able to properly process and index your resources.

Make sure the alt text for photos on the mobile site matches the alt text on the desktop site. On your mobile site, just like on your desktop site, use descriptive alt text for photos.

Make sure the material on the mobile page is just as nice as it is on the desktop page. On the mobile site, use the same descriptive titles, captions, filenames, and text relevant to the photos as you do on the desktop site.

While your site converts to mobile-first indexing, you may observe a temporary reduction of image traffic if your desktop and mobile sites use distinct image URLs. This is due to the fact that the image URLs on the mobile site are new to Google’s indexing, and it will take time for the new image URLs to accumulate enough historical search results to improve their ranking. Use the same image URLs on both versions of your site to avoid a temporary loss of picture traffic. You don’t need to do anything if you don’t mind a short loss of image traffic.

Maintaining Videos

Make sure your mobile site’s videos fit video best practices. We recommend, in particular, that you:

For your videos, avoid using URLs that vary every time the page loads. If you employ often changing URLs for your resources, Google won’t be able to effectively process and index them.

Use a compatible video format and place videos in supported tags. The presence of an HTML element, such as <video>, <embed>, or <object>, in the page defines videos.

On all your mobile and desktop sites, use the same video structured data. Check your structured data for further information.

Place the video at a place where it’s not hard for users on mobile to find it, because if the users need to scroll a lot to find the video, it would decrease the video’s rankings and user interactivity as well.

Making A New Website? Focus On Mobile

If you’re about to make a new website, focus on mobile. The desktop should not be ignored too, it’s important to have a good UX there too, but mobile compatibility should be the priority.

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To Conclude

After this game-changing update, it’s just for everyone to make mobile users their priority to rank well on Google. You must carry out the above-mentioned practices in order to assure Google that you’re good to go on top.

Thank you for reading along, it meant a lot to us.

I hope you have found all the answers you were looking for, if not! Then the comment box is wide open for you or you can mail ([email protected]) us, we promise you to reply as fast as possible.

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