Is Your Website Truly Mobile Friendly?

What Is Mobile First Indexing?

Google will primarily use the mobile version of a company's website for indexing and ranking.  In the past, the index used was the desktop version of a page when calculating the relevance of a page. Currently, web users now access Google through their mobile device. This is driving the mobile version of page content to take precedence over the desktop version.

Googlebot indexes pages with the smartphone agent. A "Crawler" is any program (like Googlebot) used to automatically scan websites by following links from one webpage to the next. This will assist with displaying the most appropriate URL to users, whether it is a desktop or mobile URL. There are ways to optimize your website for dynamic serving on a mobile platform.

Mobile First Indexing: What Is Changing?

If your website is responsive, no changes will take place as your content already adjusts to screen size. Websites that are desktop only will also not have any changes because the mobile version is the same as the desktop version.  Websites that are Separate URL (or m-dot) or Dynamic serving will need to be optimized by following Google's best practices.

Best Practices for Dynamic Serving and Separate URLs

• Your mobile site should have the same content as your desktop site. If your mobile site has less content, you should update your mobile site so that its content is equivalent to your desktop site. This includes text, images, alt tags, and videos.
• Make sure URLs in the structured data on the mobile versions are updated to the mobile URLs. If you use Data Highlighter, regularly check the dashboard for any extraction errors.
• Metadata should be consistent and present on both versions of the site. Click here for additional best practices if you have separate URLs.

Mobile Friendly Test

Unsure if your website is web page mobile-friendly? If so, use this tool to test your site.

Please feel free to contact us for details on how we can make your website mobile friendly.