Google’s mobile-first index was launched in early 2018, according to a talk by Gary Illves at the SMX Advanced conference. He explained mobile-first index adaptation.
There are things that everyone should be wary of before trying this mobile-first index.
Checking up on a few features on your website will you ready for this change.
One of the basic stuff you should have is a dedicated site on mobile or at least a responsive site for mobile devices.
For more tips and tricks to guide you through the implementation of the mobile-first index, here’s a list on what to look at on your site.
Audit your site for mobile-friendliness
Make sure that your site should not only be user-friendly but also mobile-friendly for anyone before trying it to make it a mobile-first site. You may want to look at this mobile-friendly test to see if you are hitting the Google’s standards for mobile-friendly sites.
Audit for mobile-first index adaptation SEO.
Another tool by Google to guide your site to mobile-friendliness is Page Speed Insights. It is a tool made to give you various information and data about your site’s speed.
Also, recommendations are given by the tool on what you need to do to increase your site’s performance and speed.
After going through those tools, you would want to run a complete audit of your website.
Various software and tools can help you in auditing your site, to ensure that you can do a full audit of your website.
The tool you will use should also show different factors in your site that can affect your SEO rankings in Google.
Speed your website
Mile Ohye, Google’s Developer Programs Tech Lead, said that two seconds is the benchmark for every e-commerce website’s acceptability of the users. But in Google, they try to make all sites load within half a second.
Every user online expects that the websites they enter will load fast. A fast loading website will easily get higher ranks in Google’s mobile rankings.
There are four things that you may look at in increasing your page’s speed.
First is optimizing your images. Large sized images can undoubtedly slow down a site’s loading speed. Optimizing your images into a smaller file size but still gets the quality of the image will greatly help in getting faster speed.
Second is minifying your codes. You can simplify the codes on your site since an inefficient website infrastructure can negatively affect its loading speed. You can remove all irrelevant characters but make sure that it does not change its functionality.
The third is utilizing browser caching. Enable this feature so that your user’s browsers can store resource files from your site so that whenever they enter your site again, some of its files are preloaded and will hasten the loading speed.
Lastly is decreasing redirects because a lot of this can cause your site to reload, even crash.
With the increase of voice search usage, most websites are also prioritizing local search in their site. According to Google’s Micro Moments Guide, a “near me” voice search has increased by twice in the past year.
Also, one in three users of smartphones considers buying to a brand that is very visible online.
If you want to aim for a mobile-first website, you need to become visible for users that are nearby your area.
You can do the following to reinforce your local visibility:
Enter Google My Business
Provide high-quality images of your business
Make your contact details available on every page of your website
Involve a detailed schema markup
Solicit customer reviews
Careful blocking resources
Whenever you are trying to have a mobile design, it is beneficial to block resources in your site such as JavaScript, images, etc.
These elements are leading in giving your users a slow time in loading your pages. It is also recommended to do this because of various display issues that will affect your user’s experience on your site.
Googlebot on mobile helps you in hiding these various resources from your site.
But now, smartphones and different mobile devices are becoming more upgraded than desktop computers. They have more allocated memory, faster core processors, and better performance since we are transitioning to a mobile-led generation.
Googlebot can help you in this matter and give you a faster website performance. Make sure that you show the whole website infrastructure to this tool, and it will do the rest of the work by picking what to block for the website and rank it in loading hierarchies.
Synchronized content
In comparing your desktop and mobile site, you will do it by yourself. Get a list from Google Analytics of your frequently visited and best-performing pages then you need to open it on your desktop computer and your mobile device.
You should ensure that you have equal amounts of content on your mobile and desktop page. If you do not have an equal number, you would want to redesign your site with your team.
Make sure that you also finished auditing your site before doing this practice. One way to ensure that your users and Google see the same features on your site, you may want to use Google Search Console’s Fench and Render, then pick the mobile user agent from the menu.
The tool will show two screens and you can able to check if Google and your users are seeing the same content. It will be very useful in making your site rank higher because of Google’s mobile-friendly standards.
Mobile-friendliness is becoming a benchmark of what constitutes a good website and not. Since Google uses it as one of the criteria in SEO rankings, you should optimize for mobile to ensure that your website stays relevant and competitive.
You should optimize for mobile to ensure that your website stays relevant and competitive.
It is always the quality
Focus on quality content that not only drives traffic to your website but also informative to your readers as Google will always put a priority on indexing quality content first. Even though mobile-first technology will prioritize for a mobile device.
Remember that quality shouldn’t suffer because you are trying to adapt to your mobile customers, it has to have a feel of using a desktop while using your mobile phone.
John Vuong of Local SEO Search Inc. The sole owner of the Best SEO Toronto Company. John’s mission is to help local business owners improve their online influence so they can dominate their industry.
With his business acumen and innate understanding of the local business landscape, John writes blogs that delve on how to customize SEO campaigns based on client.
Need some help in finding ways to grow your customers? Such as creative ideas to help the differentiation with potential customers? Or perhaps finding ways to work with other businesses?
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Call Mike at 607-725-8240.
So what’s the conclusion? The conclusion is there is no conclusion. There is only the next step. And that next step is completely up to you. But believe in the effectiveness of collaborative innovation. And put it to good use in adapting to changes in your business environment.
It’s up to you to keep improving your learning and experience with innovation and creativity efforts. Lessons are all around you. In this case, your competitor may be providing the ideas and or inspiration. But the key is in knowing that it is within you already.
All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new lessons.
When things go wrong, what’s most important is your next step.
Try. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step. Call today.
Are you devoting enough energy to improving your continuous learning for yourself and your team?
Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way. Call us for a free quote today. You will be amazed at how reasonable we will be.
Check out these additional articles on business and its performance from our library:
7 Surprising Things to Know About the Zillow Business Model
10 Lessons for Successful Entrepreneurs You Need to Know
Mike Schoultz is a digital marketing and customer service expert. With 48 years of business experience, he consults on and writes about topics to help improve the performance of small business. Find him on G+, Facebook, Twitter, Digital Spark Marketing, and LinkedIn.
