Statista says that global mobile data traffic would grow almost seven-fold between 2016 and 2021. As of January 2018, the global mobile population already stood at 3.7 billion unique users and 51% of all webpage views were from mobile devices. The direction in which the World Wide Web in progressing couldn’t be clearer.
All this has not gone undetected by the most popular search engine, Google. On March 26, 2018, following a year and a half of intensive experimentation and testing, the internet giant announced that it was rolling out its “mobile-first” indexing of the web. This means that the way the Google search index work will be revised, with new algorithms put in to detect mobile-friendly content.
Google had begun transitioning a few sites in December 2017 to its mobile-first indexing but with the roll-out in March, every website will have to contend with this latest update. The first thing all website owners should know is that such indexing will not give anyone a SERP ranking advantage, which has its own mobile-friendliness evaluation.
Preparing for Mobile-First Indexing
Firstly, don’t panic! Even if you don’t have a mobile-compatible site, your website can still be indexed, although it will impact rankings in this case, given that Google has been ranking for load times and mobile-friendliness for some time now. And, given that 51% of your traffic is likely to come via a mobile device (as mentioned earlier), it might be a good idea to either create a mobile version of your website or at least have the desktop version updated to be mobile-compatible.
Apart from this, here are somethings that can help with the SEO for mobile-first indexing:
Format your content
Your website will already have valuable content. If you don’t already have original, unique and engaging content, it is time to achieve that to draw in more traffic. Along with great content, you need to now choose formats that will make the mobile version of your site easier to crawl and index for the search bots. This is also true for all the meta-tags and alt-tags, including those for images.
Structuring Data
Again, this is something that your desktop version should already have. You will, however, need a mobile version of the URL, since URLs for mobile pages have their own structured data. Given the space limitations, avoid any redundant structured data that is not specifically related to the content of a particular page. At the same time the metadata of both versions of all your webpages should be equivalent. And, don’t forget to add all the social metadata so that mobile users can also share your content on social media.
User Intent & User Satisfaction
Google has actually researched how people use their devices. This research reveals that mobile web searches tend to occur in the mornings, while desktop searches occur more after the beginning of the workday. Mobile takes over again in the evenings. In addition, the time of the day when the search is conducted seems to be associated with what the user is looking for, or user intent. So, your aim is to satisfy the maximum number of users. With the mobile-first indexing what Google wants to do is to make the content relevant to the user. This requires understanding what most users visiting your site are looking for and then providing them just that. This also means looking at short-form content. Mobile users are looking for information but they want something that is easily digestible. So, while the desktop version might give in-depth content, the mobile version will have to find a balance.
So, don’t let the mobile-first indexing scare you. It really isn’t changing things as much. You still need great content that is engaging. You will still need to use multiple formats, from text to images to videos. You will still need to satisfy your visitors. However, you will need to do all this with the smaller screen size and lower attention spans in mind.