Google has officially announced the implementation of mobile-first indexing, and many companies are concerned about their rankings. Simply put, Google’s bots will crawl, index, and rank the mobile versions of webpages first. Though these changes have yet to impact current site rankings, there is a good chance that they might in the future. Here’s what you should know about mobile-first indexing and what it could mean for your business.

Google’s Mission

Google is a company just like yours, and ultimately, its goal is to be the very best at what it does. Its mission involves delivering users the most relevant results based on their searches. Since early 2015, more than half of all Google searches have originated from mobile devices. Furthermore, a Zenith forecast shows that 79% of all internet use will originate from mobile devices by the end of 2018. As a result, Google is taking a tremendous step by indexing the mobile versions of web pages before all others. This means that Google will deliver the best possible search experience for its users regardless of the devices they use.

Will Your Ranking Change?

Google claims that mobile-first indexing will not impact any site’s overall ranking. If a competitor’s website is migrated to mobile-first indexing before yours, for example, that site will have no advantage over yours because of the migration. However, it’s important to keep in mind that Google’s ultimate goal involves delivering the best possible results to users. This means that when someone searches from a mobile device, Google will rank sites and pages that are mobile-friendly above those that are not. This means that it is in your best interest to make your website as responsive as possible – and quickly.

Is Your Site Ready for Mobile-First Indexing?

Though your rankings for searches originating from desktops may not change, searches originating from mobile devices are different. It is crucial for your business to focus on mobile optimization now in order to maintain your rankings for mobile searches. To find out whether your site is ready for mobile-first indexing, consider the following points:

Is your site mobile-friendly or mobile-responsive? There is a tremendous difference between the two. A mobile-friendly website may display on a user’s smartphone, but it may still have several problems when it comes to the overall user experience. A mobile-responsive website is one that syncs your pages beautifully by sending the same HTML code to computers, tablets, and smartphones, thus eliminating the need to pinch, zoom, and change screen orientation to properly view the site. Google prefers a responsive website.
Are your desktop and mobile sites separate? It seems like a good idea, and prior to 2015 when mobile searches became more common, it was. These days, though, monitoring multiple websites and reformatting content to display properly on the mobile version is a lot of work that provides little reward.
How fast is your mobile site? A 2017 report showed that most websites around the world – and in every single industry – were three times slower than Google’s recommended benchmark of three seconds. To make your site load faster on mobile devices, check the size. Google recommends a 500KB maximum page size, but most mobile pages are measured in megabytes, instead.
Is your site laden with too many images? Finally, another 2016 report compiled through a partnership between Google and analytics company SOASTA showed that excessive images on mobile webpages actually reduced conversion rates due to the slow run times.

Prepare Yourself Now

After addressing the issues above, you can begin to prepare your website for mobile indexing in several unique ways. Google provides official advice for ensuring your site is ready for the migration – and ways to help maintain your ranking following the migration, too. The best webpages will have the following:

Consistent Content – It is important to make certain that your page and site displays the same text, imagery, and videos across all devices and that these elements are easy to crawl from mobile devices.
Structured Data – Another vital consideration is the structure of data across mobile and desktop versions of your site. What’s more, if you have two separate URLs (one for each version), then you must update the data on your mobile pages to a mobile version.
Congruent Metadata – To ensure quick migration and consistent rankings, it’s important to ensure that blog titles, image descriptions, and other forms of metadata have been updated on both versions of your site.
Server Capacity – Finally, Google cautions that some sites may lack the server capacity for the Googlebot to accurately crawl mobile websites. For this reason, make sure your server is prepared for the increased crawl rates.

Check Your SEO

After you’ve taken all the steps to ensure that your website is eligible for migration and meets the necessary criteria to keep its ranking, you can start thinking more about your mobile SEO and how to improve it. There are several ways to do this, and you can find tips spread all across the internet. Some of the best include:

Using Google’s mobile-friendly test. This handy little tool direct from Google allows you to plug in each page on your site to get up-to-date information about the overall user friendliness of the mobile version of your site. The higher your score, the better off you’ll be.
Make sure Google is indexing your mobile pages in the first place. To do it, open the Google search engine on your smartphone and type in site:mywebsite.com, replacing the mywebsite.com with your site’s address. If it doesn’t display, Google isn’t even indexing your mobile site.
Check for smartphone errors in the Search Console. Open the Google Search Console, then choose Crawl Errors, and finally choose Smartphone Errors. The steps you will need to take to resolve these depend upon the errors themselves, but once you resolve them, your content can be more easily indexed.
Remove hidden content. To put it as simply as possible, Google is not a fan of hidden content. Make sure that your entire site – all the content on every page – is visible to users on every device. If text is cut off and invisible to mobile users, this goes against Google’s guidelines and will inevitably affect your rankings.

Though mobile SEO has been important for several years now, Google’s rollout of mobile-first indexing is about to change everything. With so many people now searching from their mobile devices, it is vital that every page on your site is just as clear and easy to use on a smartphone as it is on a desktop. If you fail to take these steps now, your website may very well become completely invisible – at least to mobile users.

So your website has been successful and your profits are at an all time high, but now you have to ask yourself, could my website be better? People enjoy the Internet, but now consumers want the same information available at their finger tips through their mobile devices. So how do you build the same successful website that is more mobile friendly or if you already have a mobile site, how can you improve SEO for your mobile site? These 7 effective and easy mobile SEO tactics can help you get better mobile results.

1.) Ask Yourself If You Need To Have One

Now this first one may have you scratching your head, but there is a major difference between having a mobile site and having a mobile friendly site. A mobile website is designed strictly to be viewed from a mobile site and makes navigating the site a little bit easier, but the truth is, some professionals believe that you don’t need to have a mobile website, just a mobile friendly design. If you think going completely mobile is going overboard, then maybe you would be better off creating a better design that is both web and mobile friendly.

2.) Keep It Simple, But Not Too Simple

If you decide that you want to have a mobile website, you want to make sure the application or website is simple, but you don’t want it to be too simple. The whole purpose of creating a mobile site is to make the navigation process simple. Instead of trying to push a small button on a normal website, the same buttons should be created in a mobile format, that makes selection easier for the user. If you are aiming to make the website itself easier, you are going to be losing out on information and customers.

3.) Keep Your Content Strong

SEO experts are not coming out and saying that keywords have taken lower priority to content. People come to mobile websites looking for the same information they would find on the web, which means that your mobile content is just as important as web content. Make sure your mobile content is informative and is going to be easy to access. Don’t cut out the important stuff just because your site is going mobile. Google will still scan for relevant content and you want your mobile site to get good rankings in that scan.

4.) Have A Search Option

If customers are looking for something specific, there is nothing more annoying than having to waste time looking through various pages to find what they are looking for. Offering a search option is a great idea for your mobile site because it will save your consumers time and offer them the same courtesy that you would offer them on your regular website. You should never under estimate the power of a search bar. Organic search options have also grown in popularity as well.

5.) Be Responsive

If you create a mobile website, you are going to want to make sure that you aren’t just creating it and not bringing it to life. If your customers are using your mobile site, make sure you are being responsive. How do you do this? Make sure that you are using a responsive web design.

6.) Understand Mobile SEO

Mobile SEO is growing in popularity, but you have to have an understanding of mobile SEO to have these methods be effective. What you put on your website is going to show up in Google rankings, but so is what goes on your mobile site. You need to have an understanding of how Google will be able to tell the difference and how it will directly affect your business.

7.) Be On Your Toes

When it comes to mobile design, you are bound to encounter a few glitches here and there. Unfortunately, consumers have no time to worry about what is wrong with your mobile site. You can’t avoid glitches, but you can say on your toes and keep an eye out for these glitches and get them fixed ASAP!

Going mobile is a major step for your business and if you are going to take the dive, you want to make sure you are doing it right so you don’t risk your Google rankings. These tips can help you go mobile successfully, so you can give your customers simplicity and your company the opportunity to sit higher in search engine visibility.

Author Bio:

Derek Fraser is an online manager for Maxwell Systems Software. He likes blogging about online strategies that are related to SEO, Content, PPC & Lead generation.

Starting backwards it seems that the best advice is to check and preview how your site appears on mobile search engines. You should do this at the beginning of your mobile marketing campaign, and again throughout. You should check to see if your website is even listed on mobile search engines. You should see how far away you are from the first page. Each search result also gives a short description of your page, usually by way of a snippet of your page. You should see how your “snippet” looks and figure out if it is appealing to the user.

Preview your site on multiple mobile devices

You need to keep checking the search engine results during your marketing campaign to be sure that your website is moving in the right direction. We must assume that changing your mobile websites optimization will change the way it looks or the way it is built. For this reason you should frequently check how your mobile website appears on various mobile devices. Your website will hopefully still look good on various sizes of screens, using various browsers, and with various hardware. But, the only way you can check up on this is to preview your site on multiple devices.

Use shorter keywords

The way people use their mobile devices should factor into your decision on keywords. Many people will use less keywords because of the way they type information into their mobile device. People on mobile devices are not sat at a desk with a keyboard in front of them, so are less likely to use multiple keywords separated by commas.

Many people still use their thumbs to type into their mobile device. Some people use the touch screen on tablets to type, which they often do with three fingers on their right hand (the longest three). Even people with a QWERTY keyboard function will find it uncomfortable to write long words and complex key phrases.

Incomplete keywords

People use incomplete keywords for the same reasons they use shorter keywords, because it is easier. Additionally, if a user has been searching for ten minutes then he or she will start to take shortcuts because typing is uncomfortable. Google has also spoiled a lot of people with its autosuggestion feature. People are so used to typing a few letters and letting Google guess what they want, that some people simply type in a few letters of a word and assume a search engine will know what they mean and search for that instead.

People prefer acronyms

Some are really difficult to search for on their own because they are used by so many people. For example, acronyms such as “AA” or “AAA” will need at least on other keyword with it; otherwise, the user is faced with thousands of unneeded results. On the other hand there are some full-name acronyms that people do not even type in when they are on a desktop computer. For example, very few people ever search for “Search Engine Optimization,” most will simply put “SEO”.

Give local searches more priority

People who search using a mobile device are much more likely to run local searches; therefore, you should try to locally target your mobile website. This is especially true if have your own store or restaurant as people will want to know where you are.

Focus on current events

People with mobile devices are more likely to search out news and sport scores. People with mobile devices are more interested in new developments and current affairs updates. You should focus more on things that have time limits, such as sports scores and news articles. Focusing on current events will buy your mobile website more traffic.

They do not like scrolling down

People on desktop computers will often not venture very far past the first few pages of a search engines results pages. People with mobile devices have a similar sin, in that they do not like to scroll down. The most popular choices on mobile search engines are the top ones because they do not require any scrolling downwards. Concentrate your pages to make sure that the important information is at the top and that the user does not have to scroll up or down too much.

Author’s bio:
My name is Sonia Jackson. I represent the web-site http://www.essay-land.com. We’ll help you to solve all problems with writing different essays and research papers in a short time; we’ll answer all your questions and give you useful advice.

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