The mobile-first index is Google’s latest step in its continual journey towards making the web increasingly mobile friendly and allowing marketers to easily monitor behaviour trends. Almost one year ago Google announced that they would be experimenting with the new mobile-first indexing which would have a direct impact on the SEO of websites. Since then there have been various updates from Google in relation to the development of web search.
To quickly recap, the current crawling, ranking and indexing systems look at the desktop version of our websites. With mobile searches now overtaking desktop searches at a ratio of 55:44 problems are arising for the majority of web users, making it hard to find what they are looking for. Mobile first essentially means that moving forward Google will index and rank websites based upon the mobile experience of users and no longer the desktop experience.
It’s inevitable that changes like these will bring the average business owner worry and confusion. Questions like, “Do I need to change anything? How will this affect my business? My website is mobile friendly, will that be sufficient?” Are popping up everywhere.
If you are making use of responsive web design correctly, you are SAFE. Google stated previously in their webmaster’s blog that people accurately implementing dynamic serving that includes all of the desktop content, mostly won’t need to do anything for now. Google has already started rolling out the mobile first index for a handful of sites and they continue to slowly implement it into more and more sites. Google emphasise how they believe taking this transition slowly will help give people the opportunity to get their websites ready for mobile traffic.
If you feel that you would like to discuss this further and for a free assessment of how your current website performs, our team is here to do just that! Contact us we will be happy to assist you in ensuring that your website is running with the latest trends.
