Nowadays, it’s almost impossible to see someone without a smartphone. From working adults down to playful elementary students, you’re bound to see a mobile device in their hand. And for a business owner, this should be a clear sign that you should be moving your business’ online presence towards a mobile-friendly platform to get a big chunk of the digital market.
But how does considering optimising your website for a mobile-first index impact your business as a whole? How will having a mobile-friendly version of your website affect your SEO? Below we tackle Mobile-First Indexing and why you should consider it in your SEO strategy.
What is Mobile-First Indexing?
Mobile-First Indexing (MFI), as the name suggests, is Google’s method of indexing mobile-friendly websites and using this as a baseline for ranking. If you have a mobile-friendly website in place, you could easily rank on the first page of Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). In the event you don’t have a mobile-friendly website, the desktop version of your website will still be crawled, but the lack of a mobile-friendly website can have a negative impact on your ranking.
The MFI ranking does not only affect ranking on mobile searches, but also on desktop searches. So having a mobile-friendly website is now very more important than before if you want to get a rank boost.
How MFI Impacts online presence
Now we’ve established that having a mobile-friendly website can boost ranking, but what does it do for your online presence? If you rank quite high on the results page even without a mobile-friendly website, should you still consider optimising for mobile?
The answer is yes.
Having a mobile-friendly website doesn’t only increase your chances of ranking high on google when they send crawlbots into your website, but it also increases the load time of your website when being viewed on mobile.
According to kissmetrics, load speed can affect your conversions; so if you have a longer load time on your site, you lose viewers and get fewer conversions. But if you have a fast load time, you’ll have significantly more people availing your service or subscribing to your website.
MFI’s Impact on Your Business
Google released the MFI algorithm to cater to the growing trend of searches being made through smartphone devices. This means that ranking high is now more important than ever since almost anyone has access to the internet through mobile devices.
Given the smartphone’s limitations when compared to desktops, this means that only sites deemed by Google’s crawlers as high quality for mobile devices are going to get traffic, leaving behind those without a mobile-friendly website out of the market. Without the traffic, businesses will not survive online.
It may be a bit costly to invest in optimising for a mobile-friendly website that replicates your desktop version’s content, but it would be beneficial to your business in the long run, especially when many internet users are moving towards mobile and away from desktops and laptops.
Optimising your website for mobile is no easy task, and keeping the integrity of your website in such a small device will require help from your local SEO experts. So don’t be afraid to look for the best SEO team in your area because you will gain more from the transition in the future.
