Google’s mobile-first index rolled out on March 26, 2018, and with this Google continues to update its search engine algorithms to fulfill the needs of all tech-savvy explorers. With the index, Google will show relevant search results to searchers. In past, Google looked at web pages through a desktop searcher. Now, Google will give the first priority on the mobile versions of each web page and the second priority is the desktop versions. So, if your site is not optimized for the mobile-first index, your traffic will be impacted.
What is Mobile-First?
Mobile-first indexing shifts the priority of indexing and ranking sites to the mobile version of pages from their desktop version to create better results and experiences for Google’s predominantly mobile users.
Obviously, if you do not have a mobile version of your site Google states that your desktop site will continue to be crawled as usual. However, there are numerous that are stressed this will negatively affect comes about all things considered.
There are a couple of things you can do now to ensure your site is prepared for the mobile-first index:
Speed up your site
One of the greatest approaches to enhance your site’s mobile optimization and set up your site for the mobile-first index is through enhancing site speed. The quicker your site loads, the better user experience and better Google rank. There are few factors, which affects the speed of site:
-AMP – The Accelerated Mobile Pages Project is aimed at enhancing the overall mobile landscape. It used pared-down HTML, empowering substantially quicker loading. Content is also cached by Google itself, which accelerates load time to a great extent. A lot of plugins are available for this.
-PWA – Progressive Web Apps loads instantly, responds to user clicks and incorporated an immersive UX.
-Compress Images – Image size also affects loading time to a greater extent. It is a big offender for poor mobile performance on your site. Compressing images frees up space while decreasing page load times.
Make Your Site Responsive
Next, ensure your website is responsive. What is a responsive site? It’s a site where the design elements respond to the user’s behavior and environment based on screen size, platform and orientation giving users a great visual and browsing experience.
Design for the mobile
Make sure the design of the site is user-friendly. The font is readable. Never use flash and get rid of pop-ups. Also, mobile users navigate with their fingers so make sure your design is finger-friendly.
Create a Seamless Experience
Make sure people can do everything they need to on your site, regardless of which gadget or device they happen to be using. Make sure same content is served on mobile site as well as the desktop site. That implies articles, the same links, and the same features.
Mobile Content Optimization
If you expect your visitors to stay on your website then ensure that the content is optimized for mobile. After all, whether it is desktop or mobile device, content is one of Google’s top three search ranking factors. Write appealing headlines, include LSI keywords, build inbound links, optimize your content for keyword intent.
Don’t block CSS, JavaScript, or images
Latest smartphones have better memory, fast processors, and greater ability to manage anything we toss at them. Smartphone bots can handle all these elements so make sure CSS, JavaScript, and images are not blocked and this will let Google understand your content to rank your website accordingly.
Serve the Same Structured Markup
Your structured markup contains imperative data about your site, for example, page titles, content descriptions, contact information, that’s only the tip of the iceberg. If you don’t update the markup on your mobile site, Google may lose this important data and penalize your site. Even if they don’t, searchers won’t have the capacity to find a significant data about you when they look which could hurt your business in different ways.
Verify Your Mobile Site in Search Console
This tip is brisk and simple – however, ignoring it can make your site be improperly classified or even missed by Google.
If you haven’t already, just head over to Google Search Console and either include another site or verify your current site if it’s as of now been included. Also, Add the robots.txt to your mobile site.
Click to call option
This tip does not necessarily have to do much with SEO but this is something that makes it easy for users to call or contact you directly keeping in mind that they are already scrolling through their phone so an option to click the call button directly is really necessary.
