SEO in 2018: are you ready for Mobile First Index?

Mobile First Index revolutionises SEO in 2018. It’s now the mobile relevance of a page rather than its desktop version which prevails for its positioning on search results pages (SERP).

Mobile First Index
Posted by Vincent Hsu
on 25/10/2018

Anyone interested in the natural indexing (SEO) of sites has probably heard of Mobile First Index by now. Having already begun its deployment, it’s a major change in the indexing of websites by Google: now it’s the relevance of a mobile page rather than its desktop version which prevails for its positioning on search results pages (SERP).  

What type of mobile site do you have?

  • You have a responsive design site:

As stated by Google, there is nothing special to do except ensuring that there are no differences between versions. The differences from one version to the other are mostly found at the level of content and data structure.

  • You have a dedicated mobile site and therefore two separate URLs, for example monsite.com & m.monsite.com:

We strongly recommend moving to Responsive Web Design. To do this, it is important to follow a few crucial steps:

    • Set up 301 redirects on the old mobile URLs so that they point to the new responsive URLs. Each old mobile URL should have its redirect.
    • Remove all configurations features to existing mobile URLs on your site, such as conditional redirects or HTTP Vary header.
    • Configure a self-referential rel = canonical on the responsive URLs.
  • You don’t have a responsive design site, or a dedicated site, and therefore your site is not mobile compatible:

Nowadays, creating one is simply a must! Having said that, be careful not to rush into publishing. A working desktop version is sometimes better than an unfinished mobile version. Feel free to call on the experts.

Are you mobile friendly?

It is essential to take into account a number of SEO factors specific to mobiles in order to optimise the indexing of your site on the SERP. Here’s our TOP 3 mobile optimisations tips:

  1. The loading time of your site should be faster than ever, ideally less than 3 seconds. Test the speed of your mobile site with the Google tool for free and compare your performance with that of the competition.
  2. The ergonomy of your site must be adapted for mobile: from navigation to design through the readability of information, don’t forget that the use of a mobile is very different from that of a desktop computer. Here are some of the basic mandatory optimisations to take into account:
  • A reduced menu, taking less space or hidden by a button.
  • Simplified navigation, by reducing, for example, the number of menu items.
  • Content adapted to the size of the display window, avoiding horizontal scrolling or zooming back.
  • An easily readable font of 16 pixels CSS base size and row height of 1.2em.
  • Optimised images by reducing their size or changing their format.
  • As an option, feel free to add specific mobile features such as, for example, the search for the nearest store.

Don’t hesitate to contact us for a further analysis of UX-UI areas of improvement for your mobile site.

  1. The identification of errors and performance issues on your site is imperative to being able to solve them as quick as possible. Error 404, too many redirects or code errors are often the cause of slowdowns and reduced performance.
Posted in : SEO

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