Are Your Ready for Google Algorithm Update – Mobile First Index

Today, let’s talk a bit about SEO and what is currently trending. I’ve had a couple of emails from people asking what is happening with SEO and if the concept that became a major hit a few years back is dead. Emails in this pattern are becoming quite much, and I think it will do a lot of good that I dedicate this article to it, at least to clarify a lot of issues.

First, SEO is not dead and does not even look like it will begin to decline any time soon. You couldn’t be more wrong to think in this direction. Because SEO has been on a steady rise to its peak over the past few years and with the way Google is developing its algorithm, we expect a lot of exciting changes soon, such that if you’re not keeping up, there’s a considerable possibility of being left behind. No! I didn’t say that to scare you in any way; instead, I mentioned it to get you prepared for what’s already happening.

Recently, Google announced that over half of the pages shown in search results globally are directly based on the mobile first indexing procedure. This means that if you fail to incorporate mobile friendliness into your site, you will naturally notice a drop in organic traffic.

Lots of savvy marketers are already jumping on the trend, leveraging on mobile-friendliness of their site to attract new customers and hasten conversion on their website. One particular research even showed that a business stands the risk of losing between $80,000 and $200,000 in annual revenue if they fail to do anything about making their website mobile friendly. Before talking about a few strategies that can help you beat this trend, let’s try to explain what all of these actually means.

What is Google Mobile-first Indexing?

Mobile-first indexing simply stands for the ability of Google to crawl and index the web on how friendly it is to locate and navigate for mobile browsers.

Here, instead of focusing attention on the desktop version of a page, Google focuses on the Mobile browser version of the page.

In the digital marketing world, we’d say Google is crawling and indexing your site based on how simple it is for mobile users to access instead of the desktop version used before.

Now, the question most people ask is what they should do to beat this situation that’s already at hand. Well, the answer is pretty simple – Create a responsive website or a dynamic serving website.

There are three things you could do to get your site optimized for mobile devices. There are three things you could do to get your site optimized for mobile devices.

• First, Create a Responsive Design: This is the first and most important step towards the pursuit for a mobile-friendly site and by extension, the pursuit of improved SEO and better sales.Having a responsive web design would help users to be able to access the same website, on the same URL, across different devices, reading how contents appear across the various devices using CSS. Google has always recommended using this method since it is safe and highly effective
• Secondly, digital marketers can adopt a strategy where a dynamic serving website is created to serve users, using the same URL across different devices, with different HTML and CSS for each of the devices.
• Thirdly, digital marketers adopt the use of a website that has a different website from the mobile version.

By Google’s recommendation, the first thing to do if you seek to set your website up to beat the mobile-first index is to ensure that the website is responsive. One amazing feature of responsive websites is their ability to fit into the browser of any device due to the optimized experience that they offer, as well as their sizeable ability.

You need to start by changing the screen size of your website from the usual ones, including desktops and notebooks to a format that can be compatible with mobile phones, tablets and e-readers. View our DIY SEO Tools !

Other elements that a responsive website must include are:

• Fluid grid layout
• Fluid grid layout
• Flexible text and images
• Scalable font size
• Large clickable area for buttons
• Other elements that will assure usability

To have all the elements that we’ve mentioned above taken into account, the following steps need to be adopted:To have all the elements that we’ve mentioned above taken into account, the following steps need to be adopted

• Use image vectors for clarity
• Make everything flexible, including text blocks, image sizes and layouts.
• Make texts accessible.
• Create full heights and widths.
• Use three break points, one representing each device.

As a digital marketer who’s interested in using your site for conversion, you need to understand that the mobile- first approach is also an approach that encourages good content. The site’s heart is its content. It is the reason why the users are there in the first place.

There are a lot of other practices that would help your website rank better based on the Google algorithm update. Our advice is that you stop whatever you are doing and start investing in the brand new mobile strategy that goes alongside the brand new guidelines of Google algorithm updates.