Up To Speed on Mobile-First
The shock of mobile-first indexing is now several years old yet many businesses and SEO-related professionals are still trying to grasp the changes. All mobile-first indexing means is that desktop performance means less… and mobile means more. A mobile-first focus is also no reason to revert back to an m.dot mobile site. Most businesses I have been working with already have a far more mobile friendly and mobile responsive website than that. When ranking your website for SERPs, Google looks at over 300 factors. Therefore, there likely many items to improve on your current site before jumping into a new one. (speed, metadata, links, etc.) Considerations including a cost analysis, evaluation of internal and external factors, as well as other pros and cons is always recommended before making the decision to jump into a brand new website.
Content, and the importance of it, is not going away. It may be that people continue to do deeper research on desktop, but that doesn’t mean that the content has less of an importance on mobile. Regardless of whether or not you improve your current site, or move into a newer version; KPI”s need to be adjusted to mobile. A business should not forget desktop, but the conversation needs to be replaced with mobile. This means you an expect to bring out your mobile phone in the next digital team meeting.
Digital Content for Mobile
So content is a pretty big area covering everything from text to lists, to blog and static, to social, data, voice, images & video. (More on those later.) In today’s digital environment, one must obtain a clear understanding of how content, SEO, and E.A.T (Authority, Expert & Authorship) all connect. Although most deep search into a topic area is done on desktop vs mobile, it’s still a goal to develop quality content which is #1 SEO optimized #2Intersting & Relevant #3 Supported by trusted links supported by different browsers and #4supports top categories on your website. (The top categories on your website are your key revenue generators.) Doing all of these four things will support E.A.T.
In addition, because Google is looking to match searcher intent to SERP’s, content that addresses niche topics is l likely to benefit your business in the long run. Websites that have really good in-depth content will always be more competitive. The challenge is that mobile content is still more fragmented than desktop. Strategies such as deep linking can keep visitors on your business even if their research and journey is 100% mobile.
Mobile-First Display & Indexing Content
If a developer tells you that mobile doesn’t support the deep content of your desktop, beg to differ. The way that content is served up on mobile is slightly different due to the layout of the mobile platforms…but content is still available to the visitor. For example, “show more” is often a prompt seen on mobile to make deeper content visible to the mobile user. There are other methods used such as “hamburger menus” and “tab bars.”
In any case, you want both people and search engines to be able to find your content. So the question comes up, “how is mobile content indexed?” Content will be indexed for the mobile AND desktop versions of a page combined. Although mobile has priority, parity of content between mobile and desktop is crucial. If there is content on your desktop missing from mobile configured pages… it won’t be indexed. This includes text content, as well as metadata, and even images and alt attributes.
Organically, if your mobile website doesn’t rank for super common keywords or key phrases in your industry, you can still break through the clutter by creating content for local mobile search. This is because keywords are less competitive on a local level. Be sure that you have integrated the Google Map API and that your content is optimized with localized keywords where it makes sense. All of your mobile & desktop website pages should contain meta-descriptions, alt tags and headers specific to the content on each page. Lastly, longer meta descriptions are now an option, even in this era of smaller mobile devices for viewing search results.
Learn more about Leaning Tree Digital SEO Services.