Digital Marketing

How to make your website compatible with Google’s Mobile-First Index

Google has started rolling out its mobile-first index, which is a direct change to one of the biggest changes in user behavior. The change is not unexpected, as in the past two years, surveys and research have revealed that mobile accounts for approximately fifty-seven percent of all traffic. This move by Google means that mobile-optimized websites will take precedence over desktop-only websites in terms of ranking. Once the index changes completely, the mobile version of the websites will become the main version. To benefit from this development, search marketers need to be very vigilant in making sure their websites are fully mobile-optimized.

Here are some helpful tips for search engine optimization specialists to help them capitalize on the mobile-first era.

Observing Google Crawl Activity

When your website has switched to the mobile-first index, you’ll receive a notification from Google via your search console. However, you should collect more detailed information about the search giant’s crawling activity. By monitoring the log file data, you will be able to find out how search engine robots access your website. In case you find that there is more activity from mobile devices than on its desktop counterpart, you will have to work on making your website mobile friendly or you will lose end users to the competition. Since Google conducts various tests and the data it obtains may not be conclusive, you can hire search engine optimization services and ask the experts to closely monitor your website activities.

Develop content for mobile devices

Companies with responsive websites have very little to do in preparing the mobile-first index, but only if their content is tailored to a mobile audience. In case you have the same content on multiple devices, there is no guarantee that your site’s ranking will remain the same. In fact, research suggests that keywords perform differently on desktop and mobile. This means that consumers expect different content on different devices. For smartphones and other mobile devices, you need to create content that helps users achieve their goal quickly. You can integrate Progressive Web Apps into your mobile content strategy to give your consumers a fast experience.

Understand the journey of a mobile user

On mobile, the audience’s attention span is even shorter than on a desktop. Therefore, you must have a solid understanding of micro-moments. When your audience is on a mobile device, you basically get very short windows of opportunity to engage consumers. To make the most of this opportunity, you need a powerful data-driven strategy, like perhaps a voice search strategy, as it targets certain micro-moments. If studying consumer behavior is too big a task, you can hire the services of a professional SEO agency as they have the tools and experience to instantly provide you with the answers you are looking for.

Cover technical SEO best practices

To prepare for the mobile index first, you need to follow certain technical SEO best practices, which are:

  1. Verify that your website is a mobile site in Google Search Console by adding the robots.txt file. Your site must have an “m”. to be a mobile site.
  2. Review the metadata to find out if you can further optimize it for higher CTR (click-through rate) on mobile.
  3. Take a speed test to make sure your mobile site isn’t slow. In case it is, you need to take proper steps to optimize and speed up its speed.

You can no longer delay having a mobile website. So, get in touch with expert SEO agencies and improve your chances of ranking.

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