Google’s Mobile Index: Preparing your Business

Google’s Mobile Index: Preparing your Business
The important news that we have all been waiting for, Google has finally announced mobile-first indexing. This of course takes into account that the majority of Google users now “search” on mobile devices, as opposed to desktop computers, and so a shift needed to happen somewhere at some point.

The fact now is that businesses will need to adjust to this new algorithm. Even if the majority of your users are not searching for your company or industry on mobile devices, you will now need to take mobile search into account for best practice SEO.
Below covers the news from Google and then breaks-down exactly what you need to do to have your business be prepared.

Google announced that to date, its search engine has prioritized analysis of desktop version of a webpage’s content rather than mobile version in ranking on Google results pages—even though the majority of “Google Searchers” are using mobile devices.

As you might expect, they found this to be problematic, as it did not account for the mobile version in determining quality of web pages. Since mobile pages are ultimately the preference for most users searching Google, something had to change.

Google acknowledges that the goal is really to improve the experience for users, whether they are on desktop or mobile. This means that businesses are going to have to pay attention to both the functionality of their desktop page, as well as their mobile page (although this part isn’t really THAT new, since businesses should be optimizing for mobile by now).

Google will continue to index on one page as it does now rather than having a separate index for website and mobile. That being said, it will now place value on mobile pages when indexing a site and determining its position on search results.

Their index is actually going to be primarily comprised by mobile pages, meaning that snippets, structured data, and other content will appear on Google search results.

This is clearly a huge change in indexing, and even if you have been working on mobile optimization and planning for this kind of change over the past months or years, there are still things your business needs to do to be prepared. In the next section we will explore these more in-depth so that you can make a preparation checklist as we enter the New Year.

For more information and to identify how your business can prepare, and visit the original Search Engine Watch article.