It’s no secret that Google has been moving towards a mobile-first approach to search for some time.
Way back in 2010, Google honcho Eric Schmidt announced at the Mobile World Congress that the company was adopting a mobile-first culture, and that the “new rule is mobile-first – mobile-first in everything”.
Google’s transition to mobile-first acknowledges the primacy of mobile use across the globe. Two thirds of the world’s population are now connected by mobile - that’s 5 billion people,1 and that’s expected to climb to three quarters by 2020. Locally, around 88% of Australians own a mobile phone.2
If you run a business and have a website you need to care about mobile-first indexing because this is how Google indexes the web: effectively crawling websites from the point of view of a mobile user.
This means your website is assessed according to how it serves and delivers pages and content to mobiles and other mobile devices. If it fails this assessment you’ve lost a potential customer.
Google has been testing and tweaking mobile-first indexing for the past couple of years. Earlier this year Google announced it would be concentrating more on indexing sites that follow best practice for mobile-first indexing.
When Google crawls the web it indexes not only website content but also information about that website - called metadata - which it then uses in its ranking system.
Mobile-first is not equivalent to mobile-friendly. Google has been boosting the rank of mobile-friendly pages for around three years, and while mobile-friendly is one of a number of ranking factors, or ‘signals’, it is assessed independently of mobile-first indexing.
This is also the case for another important signal – page speed. Google announced in July that it was rolling out its Speed Update for all users. However, only pages that deliver the slowest experience to users will be affected. Again, this signal is independent of mobile-first indexing.
While Google has stated that the broader mobile-first indexing rollout is not contingent on these ranking signals, they do remain core factors in both desktop and mobile search.
For businesses, it’s no longer acceptable to ignore mobile by saying that your website visitors are mostly desktop users – because they’re not. If your website is not designed for mobile, its rankings, and more importantly your business, will likely suffer. Remember, if your site is designed with your mobile-using customers in mind it will stand a better chance of ranking well – for all your customers, both mobile and desktop.
Australian businesses who fail to meet the growing demand for digital products and services designed for a mobile world will risk losing out to overseas competitors. For small companies and organisations with fewer dollars to spend on powerhouse website hosting, this makes it all the more important to think lean and clean when designing and maintaining your website.
Your best bet is to have your website designed for mobile devices first and then make them “desktop-friendly”. Eventually terms like mobile-friendly and mobile-responsive will become a thing of the past.
A recent survey found that 40% of respondents will “walk away from a business that fails to offer them a high quality digital experience”.3
It can be a challenge to keep up with Google’s continual changes and tweaks to its SEO and ranking requirements. Nonetheless, businesses should make their website a number one priority - after all it is your primary marketing tool.
If your website performs well in Google rankings it means that customers can find you more easily when searching for your services.
1. GSMA Intelligence, Global Mobile Trends 2017, p11.
2. Deloitte, Mobile Consumer Survey 2017, p7.
3. EY, 2017, Digital Australia: State of the Nation, p7.