Is your business ready for Google’s mobile-first indexing?

Is your business ready for Google’s mobile-first indexing?

Running an online business today is as much about sound business principles as much as it’s about staying ahead of the technological curveballs that are thrown your way. This article will help you maximise benefits from these changes that tech giants such as Google implement that will impact the way in which potentially 3 Billion internet users can access your website.

In May 2015, Google saw a surge in mobile-based web searches. The results were astounding enough to have far reaching effects in Google’s indexing strategy. This big change was announced by Google in November 2016 wherein data from desktop websites would be de-prioritised in favour of mobile websites. What this meant was, that if you have a defunct, static mobile website created as a ‘good to have’, it’s now time to bring out the big guns and spruce up everything.

In a blog post by Google CEO Sunder Pichai, he describes the mobile phone as a “remote control for our daily lives”. He goes on to state that, “we’re communicating, consuming, educating, and entertaining ourselves, on our phones, in ways unimaginable just a few years ago.” This statement underscores Google’s pro-mobile outlook. In terms of indexing, sites with mobile friendly optimisation have always been ranked higher by Google.

This article explains the changes Google announced in November 2016 and provides helpful tips and tools that you can use right away to optimise your mobile website. If you have a dynamic/responsive site where the content between your desktop and mobile sites is the same, you don’t have to make any changes. This article is more useful for those of you who have a significantly different content and mark up between the desktop and mobile sites.

Change #1

As already explained, this is the major change. If you have a desktop and mobile website, Google will use the mobile website for indexing data. For those of you who only have a desktop website, this change will not affect you in any way.

To elaborate further, Google will not create 2 separate indexes for mobile and desktop sites.

Change #2

You’ll need to have more content on your mobile website. This is an obvious one. If your mobile website was created more as a catch net for users accessing your app and those on the desktop site, then it’s time to re-think that strategy big time.

You’ll need to add more content that is extremely relevant for your mobile web users on the go. So keep it simple and contextual.

To help check possible actions and warnings from Google on structured data, check out their structured datatesting tool.

Change #3

Content in tabs and accordions will now be considered by Google’s web crawler. This is a big shift in strategy for Google that had earlier said hidden content and content in various tabs will not be considered while indexing. This shift in strategy makes sense now since space on mobile websites is constrained and needs to be optimised in every way possible.

So go ahead and start adding content under hidden tabs and accordions!

Change #4

Practice safe surfing hygiene! If your website is found hosting malware or harmful material that makes it unsafe to browse your mobile website, more than once, Google will put you on a ‘repeat offender’ list. This will put your site in limbo for 30 days because you’ll not be able to submit a reconsideration request till then. So be careful of what content you’re putting out there for users.

In addition to these major changes, there are a lot of resources available to help you optimise your mobile web experience for users. This is critical because around 40% of users on the mobile drop off after a 3-second lag in content access.

To address this problem, the Accelerated Mobile Pages or the AMP project was created. AMP is an open-source project that helps users build mobile friendly web pages that load quickly and should help in improving the click-off rate in mobile users.

Additionally, you here’s a link with access a whole list of resources from Google for you to check the user friendliness of your mobile site. You can also ‘view’ your mobile website from different devices using resources such as the mobile phone emulator.

In terms of optimising your mobile site’s search ability, you should also enhance your website’s attributes for sitelinks searchbox.

Often, users arrive at your site through very different search terms. A breadcrumb basically displays the hierarchy of the searched term in the URL. Having structured data as a long-term ongoing strategy will only serve to strengthen your site’s performance on Google. 

As a business owner, hopefully this article has helped debunk any confusion caused by the news of mobile-first indexing by Google. As more and more users move to mobile web for quick searches, adopting this strategy quickly for your business is essential.