Google, like other search engine providers, know far too well how much the mobile sector is growing. They understand that a majority of searches are now completed on mobile devices. As a result, they are emphasizing mobile optimization in their efforts to improve their search engine results for this growing segment of users. They are doing this with ‘mobile first indexing.’

Mobile first indexing is ultimately changing how sites are indexed. Now, websites will be indexed based on the mobile site rather than the desktop site. With this, Google is showing a clear prioritization of its mobile users over its desktop counterparts. Below, we will be going over some of the key things that you will want to do following the news of this.

Key Things To Do:

1. Continuously Optimize For Mobile.

One of the biggest things that you are going to want to do is continuously check your mobile website to ensure that it is mobile friendly. While you do not have to necessarily have a mobile website in order to get your website indexed, it is going to be much more difficult to get your website ranking high within the search engines without a mobile-friendly website. After all, Google is putting these measures in place to weed out the websites that do not provide a good experience for mobile users. Therefore, you will want to first and foremost ensure that you have a responsive website that scales properly to mobile devices. One of the best tools that you can use to do this is to utilize Google’s very own mobile friendliness test. It will tell you whether your website is optimized for mobile devices.

2. Understand How Mobile Sites Are Navigated.

Another big thing that you are going to want to place an emphasis on is optimizing your website for proper navigation on a mobile device. While your website might be mobile friendly in terms of being responsive, you can’t just take a desktop website’s elements and slap it on a mobile website. Your mobile website should be very easy to navigate and that might mean changing some UI elements.

3. Different Copy.

When it comes to actually getting people to stay on your website and to come back for more, you are not only going to want to optimize your website to be mobile friendly but your content as well. You want to focus on implementing mobile-friendly copy when you are aiming to achieve better results with mobile-first indexing. If your copy is far too long with extremely long sentences, it is simply not going to provide an optimal experience for anyone that is using a mobile device to view it.

Overall, there is a lot that you will want to do to ensure that your website is able to achieve high rankings with this new indexing system in place. However, you shouldn’t panic. If your website is already fully responsive and you are already doing a lot of the things that you should be, you shouldn’t be penalized. However, if you are not prepared for this shift towards mobile, and you have largely been ignoring the user trend, you have a lot of work to do.