How Your SEO Campaigns Will Be Affected by Mobile-First Indexing from Google

Nowadays it is quite common for marketers to provide different content on their desktop and mobile pages while publishing online. However, in reality, Google would be ranking websites by the use of a standard desktop crawl for each and every search irrespective of the device that is being used. Though this would not be impacting anybody searching the web using a desktop, it could be causing a significant issue for all those people searching on tablets and mobiles with several users on mobile search choosing results that actually seems like answering what they had searched for but are not able to locate what they have been looking for after visiting the site. The issue arises because of lack of consistency in the content that appears on the two kinds of site pages.

The Change in the Making

Now, since mobile search is overtaking desktop with more than 50 percent of searches coming from mobile devices, now Google is bucking up and fast transforming the method it uses to rank the websites simply for enhancing all the mobile search results. Google is now switching over to the mobile search index. This change would imply that the websites that would be failing to generate exactly the same content for both their desktop and mobile sites would be adversely affected. Google is getting ready to switch over from primarily indexing desktop versions of web pages to treating mobile as their primary index. The first update for mobile from Google is ready to downgrade websites which are used to serving abbreviated or different content on mobile while presenting more detailed and in-depth versions of the desktop’s content.

The Current Status

According to experts, marketers must stay away from adding lots of markups and taking out any additional schemas which are not relevant to the content present on their web pages. This is just for ensuring that mobile websites would be getting their rankings based solely on the content supplied by them and also mobile users would be directed to the precise sites that contain exactly what they are searching for. Though the update in very much on its way, the industry is still not aware of any precise date when it would be implemented or ways to get ready for the inevitable transition. If marketers wish to understand clearly what the update entails and if they wish to be ready for the outcomes of the update, they should start adopting mobile-first tactics before any index modifications come to effect.

Serving Content

Once Google would be officially switching over to the mobile first index, the websites on mobile would be ranked only on the basis of the content that is provided by them on their mobile web pages and they would not show results which would be found solely on the desktop pages. Marketers who would be providing any less content on the mobile websites would be exposed to a risk of losing rankings and also a significant loss in traffic if the desktop content is not present on their mobile site. This would prove to be a major threat to a site’s SERP authority and positioning.

While chalking out SEO plans, marketers have to be very vigilant and extra careful if they wish to escape from penalties that would be automatically imposed on them with the update. They need to make sure that their content is the same and it is consistent across all devices whether mobile or desktop. All mobile users and desktop users would have access to the same uniform content for maintaining search rankings. This would actually involve generating content which would be suiting and corresponding with both the mobile version, as well as, the desktop version of web pages for improving the user experience. Many of you would be finding it easier to modify or completely delete versions of pages which are not corresponding with one another. This is done predominantly to avoid the rankings in the SERPs.

Structured Data

Marketers are using structured data to facilitate search engines to comprehend their website content. This is done to make sure that the web content is very much visible and discoverable. However, you need to keep in mind that the greater markup you would be using on any mobile site, the web pages would be loading slower in a browser. This encourages marketers to eliminate markup from the mobile versions of web pages for making them lighter and speeding up load time. The real concern seems to be that when Google ultimately switches over to the mobile-first index, it is to be expected that the structured data on your pages would not be visible in the mobile search results. This could lead to the loss of visibility for your web pages and the disappearance of the snippets. Google actually suggests including the structured data that is missing, right back into your mobile web page but certainly at a much-reduced percentage.

Marketers should stay away from including huge quantities of markup and take out any additional schemas which would be irrelevant to the web page content and the search results of Google. This would, at last, assist in keeping mobile page loading time efficient and quick.

Going Mobile?

Those marketers who are still in the middle of the process of coming up with a mobile version for their desktop site may consider holding off till it is finished. The update could actually be implemented anytime. So make it a point to complete the mobile site strategy before releasing it. It is always preferable to have a fully functional and effective desktop site than introducing a broken or incomplete mobile version.

Conclusion

You must dedicate all your efforts and energy into making 100 percent sure that the content you are generating is fully and easily accessible to both desktop, as well as, the mobile users. Make sure your mobile web page content is just the same as your desktop web content. Both versions of the content should be identical if you wish to stay away from any sort of penalties exerted by Google. You must realize that every website does not have a mobile version but Google would still be indexing the desktop version of precisely those web pages. However, you do not really have to devote all your energies and efforts into introducing the mobile version because of this update. You simply need to ensure that the content present on those web pages is easily and fully accessible. You may consider testing whether your website is easily accessible using Google’s testing tools.