Mobile First Indexing

Google's Mobile First Indexing Continues To Roll Out

Mobile first indexing is rolling out and if your site is verified in Google Search Console, you'll get a message like this one:

GSC mobile first message

What this means is that if your site is mobile friendly, it'll be served up in search results as the mobile friendly version.

It doesn't necessarily mean your desktop site will no longer be in search results, but if your entire site is mobile friendly, and it should be now for maximum search results visibility, that's what will be showing up in the SERPs.

This is the now the fourth major roll out to webmasters. In July 2018, mobile first indexing will be primary, with desktop running second.

Prioritizing For Mobile First Indexing

If you're still trying to get your site ready for mobile first, prioritize the pages that are the most important ones, which are typically your product and services. If you have lots of products, prioritize again by your best sellers, then get the rest of mobile ready after that.

It's critically important now more than ever that your web developer makes sure that minification and compression have been done as much as possible to make your site load quickly on mobile devices. If there's anything that searchers won't put up for, it's a slow loading mobile site.

You can test your site on Google's mobile tester to see issues on a per-page basis. Here are the results for one domain:

google mobile friendly testing

By clicking on each section above next to the red circled X, you can show your developer exactly what needs to be fixed to be mobile friendly and load faster. You can test page speed low at Pingdom, which is a free service. Here are the results:

fast page speed for mobile first

If you haven't done anything until now, start by planning priority pages with your web developer. Get those ready for the mobile first indexing by making them mobile friendly and fast loading. After that, figure out when you're going to get the rest of your pages ready, then set up a project timeline to make it happen.

Are you interested in leaning more about how to do search engine optimization? Take an SEO class from Invenio. All classes are private, taught on site and are completely tailored to each website situation.

Until we meet again, stay safely between the ditches!

All the very best to you,

Nancy McDonald

Screenshots courtesy of author

 

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