Google has recently announced an all new strategy that is going to focus on mobile devices before it searches desktop computers. Prior to this, the search engine bots and spiders would crawl your desktop site and begin to properly index your pages. Now, however, Google, who has never seen a tweek it didn’t like, has decided the main focus will be mobile devices.
So, once again, everyone has to adjust their SEO marketing strategies to accommodate the search giant’s endless tweeking. In the long term, it isn’t likely to greatly affect your rankings and traffic numbers but certainly will if you have not been putting in the proper time to get your site as responsive to mobile users as possible. If your site isn’t mobile friendly, and it loads too slowly, you will likely drop in a SERP.
Google has begun to take this tactic mainly because mobile use has gone through the roof in the last couple of years and searches done on cell phones and tablets now outnumber those done at desktops. You need to be mobile responsive. If you aren’t yet, yesterday was the time to get cracking on it. Some good news, however, now concerns your expandable content. Prior to the new mobile first standard, if you hid content in certain tabs or in a “read more” type of link, you lost it. The bots and the spiders didn’t bother chasing it. Now, the mobile first bots will find it and index it for you. Google realizes that expandable content is a must at a mobile responsive site because of the lack of space.
Right now, Google has begun to launch this initiative but it won’t be until the Spring until the full implications of this can be measured. In the meantime, until all of the proverbial bugs are worked out, there will be two different indexes; mobile and desktop. However, Google will be moving to consolidate until only mobile indexing remains.
Most have seen mobile as the future. For those who haven’t, there is still plenty of time to get your SEO strategy house in order.
-Written by Kevin Sawyer
SearchPro Systems
2024