How Does Mobile First Indexing Affect SEO?

Mobile-first indexing means that the mobile version of your site would become the starting point that Google would consider in its index. This is much like the baseline for how Google would determine rankings. When you track the crawl bot traffic to your website, you would then be able to note an increase in traffic from the smartphone Googlebot. The cached versions of your pages would generally become the mobile version.

This is called Mobile-First to be able to understand that Index is the only aspect that is valued. In a case where a site doesn’t have a mobile-friendly version, the index can still include the desktop site. The pitfall about this that the lack of mobile-friendly experience would negatively impact the rankings of your site.

When you improve the mobile experience, you can see an exponential boost to searches made even on a desktop. This latest algorithm of Google would consider the mobile version of the website as the primary one. If you look into the best SEO company, you would clearly be able to see how this aspect is incorporated and how it provides results.

Importance of improving the mobile version of websites

Various important aspects of improving the mobile version of websites are as given below:

• The sites which are being migrated to mobile-first indexing via Search console.
• Users get increased crawl rate from the Smartphone Googlebot.
• Mobile version of pages in search results and Google cached pages would be notified.

Understanding Google Index or Search Index
Often understanding the term index would be difficult. In simple terms, indexing is the process using which Google knows the pages of your website. Google initially performs a crawling action on a website and then indexes the site’s pages.

Different stages of this process

Tracking or Crawling: Google utilizes a web crawler that would analyze billions of websites in search of new and updated information. This process is much like surfing the web as a real person.

Reading the content or Scanning: To have a clear overview, the spiders can then scan both the sitemap or the existing links on your webpage.

Analyzing the data: Google then analyzes relevant information from the website, factors such as keyword, images, number of visits, internal and external links, plagiarism, etc.

Generation of the Index: Once the whole process is complete, the results from the crawl made by the Google Spider Crawl of a website are saved in the Google Index.

Often people get into the notion that having a responsive site is everything that is needed for this Google update. There are various other aspects that are taken into consideration. Optimizing the images and dynamic elements is also an important aspect to improve the mobile experience.

Some of the important aspects that need to be given attention are as mentioned below:

Space Management is Crucial:
In Mobile-First indexing, hidden content is not treated differently than what is visible. Hence, you need to effectively utilize the space that has been displayed on the screen.

Optimum Quality Content:
It is important that you select the most valuable content of your desktop site for your mobile version. It is vital that you make sure to include text, videos, and images in a format that is crawlable and indexable for the mobile version.

Properly Structured Data:
It is always better to keep things simple. Unnecessary structured data must be avoided if it is not related to the content of a specific page.

When you associate yourself with a top SEO agency in India, you would eventually achieve all these factors of Mobile-First indexing. Hence having a clear understanding, these factors are essential to be able to garner the best possible results for your business.