21 Sep Mobile First: Why it’s Google’s #1 SEO Strategy
Google moved to mobile-first indexing for all websites in March 2021 in one of the biggest search engine optimisation (SEO) shake-ups in the last ten years. The change means that Google will now use the mobile versions of your site’s pages for indexing and ranking purposes first, not the desktop.
For webmasters and marketing managers, this means that it has never been more important to set your site up for mobile crawling. In the past, Google crawled around 70 per cent of all websites with its mobile crawler, and 30 per cent with the desktop version. But with this change, Google will use the mobile crawler 100 per cent of the time, regardless of whether the site is set up for mobile or not.
Google announced in September 2020 that it was going to move to mobile-first indexing by March 2021. The search giant rarely announces the changes it is going to make to its SEO processes in advance. But it made an exception this time to allow site owners to “prepare” for what was coming.
Why Google Is Making The Move To 100 Percent Mobile-First
Even before September 2020, Google had been shifting in the direction of mobile. All the way back in 2015, the company announced that it was boosting the ranking of mobile-friendly pages in mobile search results. Later, in 2016, Google said that it was going to move towards a mobile-first approach. Most people, it said, were searching on Google using mobile devices. So it wanted to change the way that its algorithm worked away from evaluating desktop versions of pages and over to mobile versions instead.
At first, the change only applied to a subset of websites. However, as of March 2021, Google is switching all websites from desktop-first to mobile-first, regardless of webmasters preferences. From 2019, all new websites will be automatically enrolled onto the search giant’s mobile-first crawlers.
Google Doesn’t Allow You To Opt Out Of Mobile-First Indexing
In the past, there was some discussion about whether Google would allow webmasters to opt-out of mobile-first indexing. But that doesn’t appear to be the case. Now that the March 2021 deadline has passed, there appears to be no going back. Google is making it clear that brands must make their sites mobile-first if they want to perform in SEO.
Don’t panic, though. Google states that most brands won’t need to make significant changes to their sites. If you already have a responsive site where the primary content is the same for mobile and desktop, you won’t need to change much (if anything).
Testing Your Site’s Mobile-Friendliness
If you’re concerned about your site’s mobile-friendliness, you can test it using Google’s mobile-friendly tool.
Go to the site and either enter a page URL or code and then click “test.” The tool will then spit back a bunch of helpful information and metrics that allow you to determine where you are in terms of mobile-friendliness right now, and how you could improve.
The tool is helpful because it flags up problems with specific pages. You may, for instance, find that your product pages are mobile-optimised, while your home pages and contact pages aren’t.
Your Site Should Give Users The Same Experience Across Both Mobile And Desktop
Google is also moving to mobile-first because it wants to ensure that users have the same experience across both mobile and desktop. Certain features should not be blocked on mobile, just because a user is accessing a site via their smartphone.
To drive the point home, Google’s guidelines state that if a mobile site has less content than a desktop site, webmasters should update the site so that the “primary content is equivalent to your desktop site.”
How To Transition To Mobile-First
So now you know why Google is focusing on mobile-first, how do you actually implement it?
Luckily, Google provides some advice on the matter. It has an entire guide that provides the information that webmasters need.
Here’s a quick summary of some of the things that you should be doing:
- Use the same metadata on both versions of your site
- Check your visual content, making sure that you use high-quality images, image URLs that remain the same every time the page loads, and you use the same alt text as the desktop site
- Ensure that your content is the same on desktop and mobile, including having the same clear and meaningful headings
- Ensure that Googlebot can access and render your content by using the same meta tags across mobile and desktop
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