As anticipated, 2018 was a year where mobile devices increased their dominance over desktop computers as the most popular format to view and use websites.

This shift has led to a natural demand for the usability of mobile sites to be improved, with the advent of responsive design meaning that high-quality websites should be able to adapt for use on any device – be it a smartphone, tablet or desktop computer.

In 2019, the importance of hand-held devices will be demonstrated by the continued roll-out of Google’s ‘mobile-first indexing’ strategy, one of the most significant shifts in their site crawling technique in recent years.

Here we explain what ‘mobile-first indexing’ means, how it can affect your website rankings, and why it makes responsive design essential.

What is Mobile-First Indexing?

Google’s ‘web-crawlers’ are used to index every website, allowing them to gather the information provided by site HTML. This information is downloaded onto Google’s search engines, with the data collected used (alongside other factors) to decide how a website will rank for particular search terms and keywords.

Traditionally the ‘desktop’ version of a website will be indexed first, but this is no longer the case, with Google shifting to a new mobile-first approach that will prioritise collecting information from the mobile version of a website.

Can this effect how my website ranks in search engines?

Yes and no.

Desktop and mobile search engine rankings are different, so results for any particular website can vary dependent on whether the search enquiry is made using a desktop or mobile device.

So whilst desktop rankings are less likely to be affected by mobile-first indexing, the mobile version will certainly be subject to key ranking penalties based on usability factors such as page loading speed – making high-performance responsive design an SEO essential.

Another important factor is content.

Without responsive design it is easy to lose the key content used to optimise the desktop version of a website, which is often removed or cut down for display on a smaller screen. This means that mobile sites can often carry less information than their desktop equivalent, making them harder for search engines to understand and index correctly.

This difficultly in understanding exactly what a mobile version of a site is about is likely to affect rankings, and will be particularly troublesome when ‘mobile-first’ becomes the norm.

Because responsive design creates an identical version of the website for desktop and mobile devices, all content is adapted, meaning the same information can be collected comfortably from either version of a site.

Can this impact my online sales?

Yes. Mobile commerce is set to account for 54% of ecommerce sales by 2021, so it’s essential that your website is responsive and fully optimised in order to keep up with competitors.

Find out more

If you would like to talk about making your business website fully responsive for use on mobile phones and handheld devices, contact the team at SEO It Right today.

Call out friendly team on 0121 3080219 or email us at [email protected].