Google’s Latest Mobile Index Update: How to Prepare
Google has been talking about mobile-first index for approximately a year and a half now. On 22nd March Google finally announced that they are gradually rolling out the mobile-first index. What does this mean for the average business owner and how will it affect traffic? What changes do you need to make to your website to ensure you maintain your rankings?
Why move to a mobile-first index?
Google used to rank websites based on the content and indexation of the desktop version. Nowadays users are utilising mobile phones for searching and many users are using mobile phones exclusively for accessing information, therefore they want to make sure they reflect that reality. Google plans to transition everyone from the desktop index to a mobile-first index.
How will this affect my website?
The ideal setup is to have a responsive site so the content shown to a user is the same content that’s shown to every user. If you have built a separate mobile website that has different content to the desktop version, then that’s where this change may have more of a negative effect on rankings. It’s definitely time for you to double check and update your website if you haven’t already done this. Here’s an example of iconic brand Myer using m.myer.com.au version as well as serving the user with different content on mobile vs desktop.
It’s important to ensure the text/content is the same across the desktop and mobile site, or at least equivalent to the desktop. Images, videos, movie or media content is also important to have all these elements. If these are not included they won’t be available in image search.
I’ve seen a lot of websites where images or sliders have been removed for the mobile site, so it’s important to know that anything that’s not visible there, is not going to be visible at all.
What changes do you need to make to your website to ensure you maintain your rankings?
Moving forward, best practices for a mobile-first index is to ensure that your site is obviously mobile friendly. Users should be able to do everything that’s possible to do on a desktop, so they don’t have to switch. Ensure that these actions work really well on mobile.
- Get a Responsive Design Site: If you haven’t already moved to a responsive site, then you better get this done asap. Ensure there’s no duplication in content.
- Content should be the same as Desktop site: Ensure that the content including image media content is as similar or equivalent to the mobile site.
- Avoid hiding content with intrusive Interstitials: Google has penalised sites with pop-up ads. Ad Publishers need to adapt and look into new strategies, such as developing a better content marketing strategy for generating more leads/revenue.
- Speed is crucial: Most sites lose half their visitors while waiting for it to load. There are many web page speed tools online such as https://developers.google.com/speed/, http://www.webpagetest.org/, https://testmysite.thinkwithgoogle.com/ to help you optimise your website speed.
- User Experience: Get the ball rolling by identifying the problems that users are trying to solve on your website. Common issues with simple fixes include:
- Text too small to read
- Ensure that touch elements are not too close together e.g. navigation links or buttons are too close to each other where users can’t tap the desired element with their finger
- If you have an ecommerce setup or something where the users need to sign up, e.g. filling out forms or entering credit card details use auto-fill fields
- Structured data: Organise your website data that can be easily translated to rich snippets for mobile search results.
- Unblocking important resources: Ensure your site is not blocking major resources that Google needs to be indexing such as JavaScript files, CSS files etc., as it could lead to soft 404 errors resulting in lower rankings
How will I know when my site is moved to mobile index?
Google will be sending out messages to sites that will be shifting over to a mobile index through Search Console.
Sleep peacefully knowing your site is ranking well.
It’s time to jump on the mobile-first index bandwagon if you haven’t already.
