What does Google mobile indexing mean for my site?

To be successful online requires coming up against a lot of competition. The name of the game is Search Engine Optimization (“SEO”), finding ways to ensure your website is highly visible, easily navigable and regularly comes up in searches. On top of that, more and more people are performing searches from their mobile devices, which requires that your website have a mobile-friendly version. You may have even seen that Google recently started mobile-first indexing. But what if you haven’t quite reached that point in your site development yet? Will it affect your website traffic and, ultimately, your bottom line? Short answer – No!  Longer answer…..read on!

What is Mobile-First Indexing?

Mobile-First indexing just means that the mobile version of your website is the first version of your website that is recognized or recorded in a search. It does not mean “mobile-only” – in other words, your website does not have a mobile version yet, the desktop version can still be included in the index. It’s more about how content is than how it is ranked. Google will still have one single index that they use for serving search results.

Will Mobile-First Indexing Impact My Website’s Ranking?

According to Google’s blog, “Content gathered by mobile-first indexing has no ranking advantage over mobile content that’s not gathered this way or desktop content.  Moreover, if you only have desktop content, you will continue to be represented in our index.” It seems like this move by Google is a gentle push to encourage webmasters to make their content mobile-friendly. This is a good direction to move in, since as I stated before, a large number of users are searching from their mobile devices. The ranking in search engines will still use many other factors to determine the most relevant content, besides mobile compatibility.

Okay…no need to worry.  But what should I do from here?

So far, this change is in very early stages and is not being rolled out to sites that will have anything more than a minimal impact. If you are happy with your rankings, you won’t have to do anything differently. However, this development may be a cue for you to take stock of your current website, ensuring that your mobile page speed and load time are correctly optimized for an increasingly mobile world.  If you are looking for guidance on how to reach your SEO goals so you can get back to the business of….well….your business, Standard Beagle can help.