07/06/2022

Guide For Marketers About Mobile-First Indexing

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Do you remember the original announcement about mobile-first indexing?

Google fully launched the system in March 2021. This means you cannot avoid the change. After long delays and COVID-19 interruptions, mobile-first indexing is now used on 100% of all websites on the internet.

What should marketing staff know about this new process? Let’s find out!

What’s Mobile-First Indexing?

This guide contains all the information that marketing teams need. It is important to understand the basics of mobile-first indexing. This means that your mobile website is given more weight when indexing and ranking it.

One of the most commonly held misconceptions is that there are many. Google uses only one index. This is contrary to popular belief. Google will not index your website if it only has content on its mobile version.

We recommend you read the Google documentation. The documentation explains everything. It explains everything.

The Googlebot will continue to crawl mobile websites in the future. For some time, 70% of websites were in the mobile-first category, while 30% were in traditional desktop indexing. 

However, this doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t worry. This will allow you to focus your efforts on optimizing the website.

Checklist for Mobile-First Indexing

We have listed the essentials to ensure strong Google performance, with mobile-first Indexing playing a significant role in Google’s performance.

Site Audit

First, do a site audit. Next scan your mobile website. Compare the results.

When performing a site audit, your goal should be to ensure that the mobile website is as clean and error-free as possible. Googlebot can penalize you if there are any. This will reduce the likelihood that your website appears in search results.

  • Speed: Search for Enhancements in the Google Search Console. Next, go into Core Web Vitals. Next, you will see a mobile option. Google gives a high priority to page speed which results in a higher ranking.
  • Design Click again in the Google Search Console on Mobile Usability. To check tap targets, text size, padding, and other elements that affect the experience,
  • Interstitials and Pop-Ups – This feature can easily be checked by tapping on your website. 

Are all internal links functioning correctly? If not, it’s probably not a problem. External links can sometimes cause problems for internal links. Mobile-first indexing won’t work because there are fewer mobile options. This will affect PageRank and indexing.

Content

Sometimes it can be hard to create a mobile site that is the same as the desktop. 

Google will not consider identical websites for mobile and desktop, but they must have at least the same content. However, removing valuable content because it isn’t visually appealing or feels right could hurt your SEO efforts.

As mobile content options improve, so do our options. If you go too far, Google may punish you.

Mobile-First Indexing – Common Issues 

SEO isn’t a straightforward business. SEO is not an easy business.

Googlebot may also have trouble crawling mobile websites. Googlebot cannot retrieve any information from any page so you won’t show up in search results. 

Let Googlebot have access to your website, and any other areas of it, if you want to avoid common problems. Avoid using noindex meta tags.

Make sure that there is enough crawl space on the server while you review. In an ideal world, the server should be capable of handling both mobile and desktop crawls at the same time.

Top Tips – Optimizing Mobile-First Indexing

Let’s end with some tips and tricks for businesses and marketers to optimize their sites for this update. This Google update will impact everyone who wishes to rank high in search engines.

It is a good idea for mobile and desktop websites to be aligned separately. Now it’s time to link them together as the user experience should remain the same.

Next, you need to verify that your structured information is correct.

Website owners often search for industry secrets. However, much of the best advice comes from Google. 

About the author

Kobe Digital is a unified team of performance marketing, design, and video production experts. Our mastery of these disciplines is what makes us effective. Our ability to integrate them seamlessly is what makes us unique.