The original date they set was September of last year and, even allowing for a pandemic, it’s strangely satisfying that Google has missed a deadline by several months. But even the shifting milestones are important and this one ought to be on your radar - assuming you have a website and that you care that people can find it.
As of the end of March just passed, Google has finally finished setting its search engine to 100% mobile-first indexing - so now is a very good time to review whether your site is ready.
From now, when indexing websites for search, it will all be done by Google Smartphone, meaning that your site will be ranked predominantly (but not exclusively) by how it presents on the mobile view.
You can geek out what that means here, but the basic fact is that from now on, Google will primarily base what it places in its search index on the mobile version of your site, whereas they used to index the desktop version of your site first. The desktop version will be indexed as a secondary action.
The move is an obvious response to the fact that more people are accessing search via their mobiles - the need, therefore, is to concentrate on those sites which give a better mobile user experience.
So if you want your brand and products to be more visible in search results and prominent on the front page of a search (given around 85% of people don’t go beyond that), then you have to make sure that the mobile experience is as good as it can be.
Google’s changes won’t have an immediate dramatic effect for your search visibility, assuming that your site has been built relatively recently and has a responsive design.
That way, your mobile site has the same content as that which users see on their desktop - and there’s no immediate issue. But make sure you’ve investigated which side of the fence you fall on these issues:
Separate mobile and desktop sites
It’s a bit old-fashioned, but if you’ve not upgraded your website for a few years, you may still be guilty of an old habit of having a separate mobile site (where the user is defaulted to a mobile or desktop version, dependent on what device they access it from) then there may be a problem if the mobile version has less content.
Everything you’ve always offered on the desktop site should be available on the mobile version. You may have removed content as a nod to usability, but that’s not, in fact, good practice. This mobile parity should also include meta data like titles, descriptions and robots meta tags.
Usability
Of course, you can improve mobile user experience by following best practice for usability (and we can help there).
On something as fundamental as the site menu, for example, Google recommend that hamburger menus are perfectly fine to use, despite the horror of the user experience community. On mobile, these kinds of menus make sense; they help a mobile user to browse through your website. Putting content behind a tab to make the mobile experience better is also totally fine.
Copy
Remember that reading from a small screen remains a less-than-wonderful experience, so you’ll need to have mobile-friendly copy. This means short sentences.
With compact paragraphs.
Pretend you’re Hemingway.
You also need to make sure your font on your mobile site is large and clear enough, and you need to make sure to use enough whitespaces.
Design
Take some time to evaluate the mobile version of your website. Is your user experience good enough, or could the design improve - at least on the basics - buttons that are large enough to tap, fonts that are large enough to read. The sort of things that will improve the mobile experience - and hence your rankings.
Test
To see how you’ll perform in all this, the best place to start will be Google’s mobile-friendliness to test and check whether or not your site is mobile friendly. If your site does not pass, then your mobile version is not up to scratch, so talk to us as well as reading Google’s own documentation on how to get your site ready for mobile-first indexing.
Check for yourself how your site fits these new(ish) criteria or, if you’re unsure, talk to us about one of our technical audits and we can tell you how you’re placed - and we can help you get your copy, your design and your SEO strategy all in place.
Just get in touch. We won’t bite.
