How do you Optimise for Mobile-First Indexing?

How To Optimise for Mobile-First Indexing

Google will predominantly use a mobile version of a website's content to index and rank your pages. This is mobile-first indexing. It is not a requirement to have a mobile friendly version of your website, but it is recommended, ensuring all your visitors have a good user experience (UX).

Mobile-Friendly Website

If you haven't done this already, you will want to create a mobile-friendly website, ensuring your visitors using mobile devices have a great user experience (UX). There are three ways to do this:

• Responsive design – same HTML code and URL, whether user is using a smart phone, desktop, tablet, or non-visual browser. It does display the content differently based on the user's screen size. This is the design most recommended by Google, as it is easy to design and maintain
• Dynamic serving – same URL regardless of device relying on user-agent sniffing, providing a different version of the HTML based on the device used
• Separate URLs – a different URL for each device relying on user-agent with vary HTTP headers to direct users to the right device version 

Ensure Google Can Access the Content 

When creating a mobile-friendly version of your website, ensuring you use the same robot meta tags on the mobile and desktop sites. Using different tags can result in Google not crawling and indexing your pages, once your site is enables for mobile-first indexing.

Ensure that Google can crawl your resources. Resources sometimes have different URL's on a mobile site, when compared to your desktop site. You want Google to crawl your URL's, so ensure they are not blocking the URL with a disallow rule.

Consistency

It is important to ensure that both your desktop and mobile site have the same content, different layouts can result in understanding the content differently. When you have the same on both sites, you ensure the two versions rank for the same keywords.

In the event your mobile site has less content than your desktop site, update the mobile site to be equal to your desktop, as this is the primary content. 

Structured Data

Structured data must be present on both versions of your website, it's important to check:

• Both versions have the same structured data
• The correct URL's are used in your structured data
• Both versions should have the same meta data

Images

Images used on your mobile website must follow the best practices, providing high quality images, using supported format for images, and don't change the URL when the page loads for images, as Google cannot process and index the pages correctly.

Conclusion

As Google primarily indexes and ranks using the mobile version of your website, it's important you optimise your site for mobile-first indexing, helping you reach your audience, increasing brand visibility, and driving organic traffic to your mobile and desktop websites.