Amidst the continuous search engine algorithm updates and evolving search trends, one which has continued to be a proverbial thorn in many technical SEO specialists’ sides is mobile-first indexing.
Yet the numbers don’t lie – reportedly 63.38% of web searches are conducted via a mobile device, according to aggregated data from Exploding Topics. It doesn’t take an experienced data analyst to understand that websites need to be optimized for mobile, as those that don’t risk seeing their rankings plummet downward.
Search engines – particularly Google – have, over the years, adapted their indexing, crawling and ranking processes to prioritize mobile-optimized websites. So what exactly are the intricacies involved with mobile-first indexing and its potential effects on a website’s performance in the SERPs? This article seeks to uncover that as well as how technical and data SEOs can utilize it for the benefit of their clients.
Understanding mobile-first indexing
Mobile-first indexing refers to a series of processes that search engines adopt to primarily crawl the mobile version of a website’s content for indexing and ranking. The ethos behind it is to better help users find what they are looking for, as invariably the desktop version of a website may look vastly different on mobile devices.
The move to mobile-first indexing was triggered by the growing trend of mobile device usage and, by extension, the increasing amount of searches conducted on them. Google first introduced mobile-first indexing in 2016 where, up until that point, search engines predominantly used the desktop version of a website to determine its relevance to the user and that was reflected in the rankings.
With mobile devices now the primary means of using and searching the web for many users, Google recognized the need to adapt and prioritize mobile content in its indexing process.
Despite this, Google and other search engines still look at and index the desktop version of a website, but given that mobile-friendliness and user experience are so firmly intertwined, it essentially plays second fiddle. If a mobile version of a website doesn’t exist, the desktop version will still be indexed but a hampered user experience may negatively influence the site’s rankings.
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The impact of mobile-first indexing on rankings
Understanding how mobile-first indexing can affect a website’s rankings is useful, particularly if you are trying to establish how or why your mobile website isn’t performing well in organic search. It can help to take a comprehensive look at whether your site is truly optimized for mobile-first indexing.
Mobile user experience (UX): Website pages optimized for mobile devices and offering a seamless, easy browsing experience are more likely to rank higher in mobile search results.
Content: If your mobile site has less content than your desktop version, or if it’s been duplicated across different pages on mobile, you may see your rankings affected.
Page speed: As Google places a strong emphasis on page speed and loading times, if your pages are slow and unresponsive on mobile, your rankings can be drastically reduced.
Crawling: Mobile-first indexing may affect how search engines allocate their crawl budget to a website. Identifying and fixing crawl budget issues could help your visibility in search results.
Structured data: Implementing logical, structured data on your mobile site can be instrumental in helping your site earn and maintain rich snippets in search results, such as the Local Pack, featured snippets, and shopping listings.
Schema markup: Schema markup visible on desktop but not mobile pages is a missed opportunity, as this can influence rankings and, by extension, click-through rates and conversions.
Benefits of implementing mobile-first indexing
Taking advantage of mobile-first indexing offers several advantages for website owners:
- Improved UX
- Better organic search visibility
- Outranking competitors
- Increasing engagement
- Faster page load times
- Reduced bounce rates
- Greater chances of rich snippets
- Increasing click-through rates and conversions
- Future-proofing websites
Assessing your website’s mobile-friendliness
There are several methods to consider when evaluating your site’s mobile-friendliness and responsiveness.
Firstly, several Google mobile tools that were used to help site owners identify issues and areas for development are no longer available.
In late 2023, Google dropped the Mobile Usability report in Google Search Console and the Mobile-Friendly Test tool and API. These tools allowed website owners to check whether their pages were optimized for mobile devices across a wide range of manufacturers and isolate specific pages that may have usability issues.
In their place came Lighthouse, an open-source, automated tool located in Chrome DevTools for improving web page quality. This tool allows site owners to easily run a series of audits on web pages, with any failures highlighted proving influential in how to improve them. Lighthouse can be run directly in Chrome DevTools, as a Node module, or via shell scripts or a web user interface.
Alongside this came PageSpeed Insights, which allowed for more granular assessments and inspections of page load times across both desktop and mobile. Google subsequently introduced Core Web Vitals in 2021 as an initiative to provide guidance on quality signals that constitute a great user experience, predominantly on mobile.
From the outset, Core Web Vitals (CWV) measured three core metrics: loading performance, (Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)), interactivity (Interaction to Next Paint (INP)), and visual stability (Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)).
PageSpeed Insights adopts these UX analytics along with Speed Index, Total Blocking Time and First Contentful Paint (FCP) as other metrics to determine speed. All in all, it combines to offer a comprehensive suite of user-friendly testing tools to assess mobile pages more frequently and cost-effectively.
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Chrome DevTools also offers tools to test website responsiveness, allowing you to explore responsive features directly in the Chrome web browser, although it’s worth mentioning that other browsers offer similar functionalities. Using this tool, you can use preset device sizes via a dropdown menu (such as iPhones, iPads, Samsung Galaxy and Google Pixel devices), simulate network conditions, test websites on ‘less powerful’ devices through a CPU throttling option, and more.
Overcoming mobile-first indexing challenges with technical crawling solutions
While manual checks can undoubtedly prove useful, advanced technical crawling solutions like Oncrawl can provide additional, more comprehensive insights into your website’s mobile-friendliness and potential indexing and ranking issues.
When conducting an audit of your site’s mobile friendliness, Oncrawl can provide detailed mobile crawl data with or without parameters and filters, flexible settings to crawl JavaScript links or development/staging sites and scraping features to extract information and include it in aggregated data sets.
You can also choose to set up multiple crawl profiles with different criteria and configure automated reports to help monitor any progress or changes in your site’s performance.
Using this alongside open-source tools will give you the best possible chance to overcome many of the issues that are affecting your mobile pages from ranking well in search.
Conclusion
Mobile-first indexing is here to stay, and as SEO’s future looks heavily mobile-focused, it would be naive to suggest it’s going away anytime soon. As such, businesses must continue to adapt and align their SEO strategies to account for mobile-first indexing and new evolving SEO trends which could influence this practice in the near future.
Google and other search engines will no doubt update their algorithms in a matter of months or even weeks, but don’t let mobile-first indexing become anything less than a priority as you continue to scale and adapt your business for maximum organic search visibility.