What Google’s Mobile-First Indexing deadline means for website SEO

Whatever be the nature of your business or your SEO Strategy, you can’t ignore mobile anymore as it is an integral component of your Online Marketing strategy. All of Google’s latest algorithm updates indicate that mobile is the way to go and if you haven’t paid attention to mobile SEO, then right now is a great time to start building your strategy for 2021.

Beginning March 2021, desktop-only sites will be completely dropped from Google’s search index. Their announcement says that they now completely index with a smartphone Googlebot. All content must be seeable/reachable by a phone. This includes assets like structured data, videos, images, comments etc. that you would like to index. Find out how you can ensure your website’s ranking remains intact post this date.

• Monitor m-dot sites

The performance of mobile websites that are set up with a separate m-dot version needs to be monitored because there is a bug related to the update.  M-dot sites may experience that users with desktop browsers are sent to the mobile version of the site from SERPs.

It is recommended that websites detect this issue and redirect them to the correct version. If you are using the services of an SEO Company then ask them to help you out.

• Make the most of video and images

Ensure you follow video and image best practices recommended by Google. This means images and videos need to be optimized for mobile sites and image alt tags should be meaningful. Also ensure that the image URLS on the desktop site are copied over to the mobile version. It is helpful to check if Google’s video indexing system can index your videos and if the images and videos on your mobile site are easy to find.

• Use the same resources and content across desktop and mobile

For Googlebot to see all your content, you need to ensure that your mobile and desktop site have the same resources and content. So ensure you use the same meta tags across both versions of your website. Make sure you are not disallowing crawling of URLs across different versions in your robots.txt file.

Find more information on these suggestions on Google’s announcement blog on the Webmaster Central Blog.

If you are looking for ways to improve traffic on your website or want to improve search engine rankings of your website or targeted keywords. Akshar Softweb also provides Marketing & Development services like SEO Services, Search Engine Optimization, Digital Marketing, Internet Marketing Services, Online Marketing, Digital Marketing services, Web Marketing Consulting, SEO Strategies, Website Development, eCommerce Website Design, and much more.

Contact us online or you can send us an email at info@aksharsoftweb.com.