Who doesn’t love saying: I told you so

I have been banging on about Google and MOBILE for quite some time.

To me it was only logical.  More and more people are searching the internet on mobile devices, whether on tablets or smartphones.  So, it was only a matter of time before engines like Google started ranking results based on device.

For these reasons, Google will slowly roll out changes to make mobile sites first priority when it comes to indexing content for relevance and quality. Google will still index desktop site versions, but they’ll give mobile the first priority.

Mobile is more important than ever. Just recently, at the end of 2017, industry experts started to notice mobile-first testing and rollouts for a few sites.

Here’s what you need to know.. is your site ready and what changes will you need to make?

Make Your Site Mobile-Friendly or Responsive ASAP

According to the Google press release, there are a few conditions to be aware of with mobile indexing. First off, Google made it clear that sites using mobile-friendly or mobile-responsive protocols that are up-to-date would fair well with this update.

If your site is mobile-friendly or mobile-responsive, meaning your content dynamically updates between desktop and mobile, you won’t have to make any fundamental changes to your site. While that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t be concerned about improving your mobile site, it means that you have less work to do.

So, how do you know if your site is mobile-friendly or responsive? One of the easiest ways is simply using Google’s Mobile-Friendly test tool.

You can also run your website through a third-party tool such as Responsive Design Tool but why would you?

If your website is not responsive, it’s time to change. Be warned, this is happening as we speak. From March 2018 Google is rolling out it’s Mobile First indexing.

If your website has separate mobile and desktop versions, your site is NOT mobile responsive. If you cannot view your content in a mobile device, your site is NOT mobile responsive.

For starters, ensure that you serve structured markup for both your mobile and desktop site versions. You can double check these efforts using the Structured Data Tool. Run your URL through the structured data tool, and it will send your data directly to your Google Search Console account under “Search Appearance → Structured Data.”

From here, see if your structured data can be crawled without error and if sitemaps update accordingly. If you find problems, the search console will give you exact steps that you need to take to fix the issues.

Have a great day!