With the constant changes that Google is doing on indexing and ranking, it’s really hard to keep up. One of the recent changes they made was mobile-first search index, which will affect your website’s SEO performance. You’ve probably heard of the term mobile-first indexing which aims to make the web more mobile-friendly and reflect user behavior trends.
Mobile-first indexing basically means your website’s mobile version becomes the starting point for what Google includes in their index and the baseline for how they determine website ranking. This is because of the recent spike in the number of users who visit websites using their mobile devices. For instance, if a site does not have a mobile-friendly version, Google will still include the desktop site in the index. However, if you lack a mobile-friendly experience, it could have a negative impact on your website’s SEO ranking and a site with better mobile experience will receive better ranking from Google.
If you’re not sure about the your website’s mobile version, here’s a list of things you should look into and consider to improve your SEO performance:
- Mobile-first design
Designing your website’s mobile version is not the same as designing your desktop version. To have a positive impact on your SEO performance, your mobile website needs to be simplified and should follow these:
- Don’t use Flash because the plugin may not be available on your user’s phone, allowing them to miss some of your contents.
- At times, pop-ups can be irritating especially on mobile so don’t have any or it might lead to a high bounce rate.
- To prevent accidental clicks from some users, make sure that your mobile website will not have too big or too small buttons. When deciding on how your button’s size, consider people who have fat fingers as they are the most affected by this.
- Make sure that your website is responsive, which means your content will automatically resize according to the device to give users a great visual ad browsing experience.
- Optimize your content for mobile
Your website’s content should be similar whether it be on mobile or desktop. You need to make sure that the content quality on your desktop site will be the same as your mobile site. This doesn’t just apply for your text content, but should also be applied to your visual content. When adapting your images for your website’s mobile version, make sure that you follow best practices.
- Mobile friendly page speed
When working on your website’s mobile version, you need to make sure that it loads quickly. This is important because Google considers a website’s page speed when ranking mobile websites. There are a lot of available pagespeed tools available on the web, but if you are not yet familiar with how it works, it’s best to consult SEO companies that could help you with your needs.
Creating a mobile-first experience of your website for users is more important now than ever before. This is something that you can no longer ignore because Google has been prioritizing mobile-friendly sites.
You shouldn’t let the lack of a mobile-first experience stop you from ranking well. If you are not sure where to start on this, we recommend talking to an SEO company who can provide you the end-to-end help you will need. One of the top SEO companies in Sydney, Australia is CMSIT. If you are interested to learn more about our SEO services, you can visit our Contact Us page
