If your website isn’t keeping up with the internet, its falling behind—but luckily, so are your competitors.
As of July 1, 2019, Google declared mobile-first indexing to be the default for all new websites, making this the perfect time for your business to rise above.
Reporting nearly 60% of searches coming in from mobile devices, Google has been rolling out major shifts in the way it indexes websites since early last year. While the recent announcement mentions newly published websites, what will happen to your existing one?
That all depends on you.
Historically, Google has indexed the desktop version of a website. Last year, the company began slowly migrating websites they felt were ready to be crawled and displayed in the search results based on their mobile versions. If your site has been shifted, Google will have notification waiting for you on Search Console .
Whether or not your site has been affected yet, now is the time to act.
Given the “Mobile-first,” and not “Mobile-only,” nature of the shift, there will only be one index at work. This means your desktop-only site won’t disappear from the search results; however, you will find it lower in the search results as this shift continues.
Danny Sullivan, Google’s “search liaison,” describes it best:
So, here’s what you need to do:
- Create a RESPONSIVE and DYNAMIC website — A mobile site must now grab the attention of both viewers and Google. Try using pages that respond to the user’s screen size and consider varying the text and graphics across device-specific versions.
- Be CONSISTENT with your content and data — Google recommends having the same content encoded across both versions of your site. Moreover, the structured and meta data should match.
- SPEED UP your site — Google reports 53% of mobile users will leave a page if it doesn’t load within three seconds. Use PageSpeed Insights to run diagnostics and discover speed boosting opportunities.
The fruit is hanging low for now. Mobilize your site before other businesses do.
Photo by Christian Wiediger on Unsplash