Mobile-first indexing – Google announced to start with mobile-first indexing in 2018. After a couple of years, Google has announced to roll-out mobile-first indexing for the world. Means, all website will be switched on the mobile-first index. But how will it affect the rankings? This is what we are going to talk today!

Studio45 – The best SEO company in India brings up a few must-consider things to give an edge to the ranking strategies.

Let’s dig into the information!

Ensure Googlebot can see the full content and resources

Through mobile-first indexing, Google will get the website information from the mobile version, so it is important to ensure Googlebot can see the content fully (at least, worthy information) and resources. Things every SEO nerds should focus on:

• Use the same robots meta tags

Keep the robots Meta tags same on the mobile version and desktop version. If you have used a different robot Meta tags like “no index” and “no follow” then, Google may not index or follow links on your page even after your site is active for mobile-first indexing.

• Avoid lazy-loading the primary content

Lazy-loading occurs more on mobile than on desktop. While we go through any website with videos and lots of images, it takes lots of time. It’s better to follow Google guidelines for lazy-loading. Try to avoid lazy-loading the primary content that requires users’ interaction such as clicking, typing, or swiping. It’s because Googlebot will not trigger these interactions.

Let’s understand this with an example!

If your website page has 10 primary images on the desktop version, and the mobile version has two out of those 10. The remaining 8 images will load after users click on the “more” button. Until the user clicks “more” button, Google will not see those images. The result is, the remaining 8 images will not be indexed or shown in Google images.

It saves from lazy-loading!

Keep the primary content the same on mobile and desktop

Why would anyone reach to your website? What’s the purpose behind your website? The content you showcase on your website should indicate the vision. It should be same on mobile and desktop both. You should look into the mobile version so that the content that you want to rank or the information you want to share with the visitors reach on point. If you trim your content for the mobile version, your website may lose the traffic when Google enables mobile-first rankings for the website. This is because; Google will only have a few of the information, not whole.

It’s better to use meaningful and cut-to-cut information for the mobile and desktop versions for visibility.

Check the quality of image & video

Make sure about the image quality, video & image placement, and URLs for mobile and desktop versions. Here is a glimpse of how these things work!

• Image quality

Be careful while you choose images or videos for the website. Images with low quality, small, and a low resolution on the mobile version may affect the ranking. Images with low quality might get ignored by Google indexing. Like an example, if you have 10 good quality images on the desktop version but the same size images won’t work for mobile versions. You need to use very small thumbnails for these images to make them fit into small screens.

• Image URLs

If your desktop and mobile versions have different URLs, you may significantly loss traffic from Google images while your site shifts to mobile-first indexing. These things occur as the image URLs on both the versions are new to the Google indexing system and the system will take some time to understand the image URLs properly.

• Video & image placement

If your website hasn’t properly placed videos and images then it will affect user experience on mobile devices. This will backlash your website from the list of Google visibility. It is important to make sure to position images and videos in the right location on the mobile versions.

Just like evolution in many industries, mobile-first indexing comes up as a challenge to the experts who work to manipulate rankings using various strategies. There’s a lot more in a way to become an SEO nerd. Studio45, the best SEO company in India will be back with the latest updates. Stay tuned!