Mobile-first indexing refers to the process of Google using the mobile version of your page for indexing and ranking. This means, you need to focus more and more on the mobile version of your website, as the first thing that Google pinpoints is your website’s index and includes it in their baseline for determining the rankings.

If you carefully monitor the crawl bot traffic, you will notice that the traffic generated on your website is mostly coming from the mobile version of the page. This truly indicates and emphasizes the importance of having an optimal mobile-friendly version of your page in order to rank your website better.

In case you don’t have a mobile-friendly experience for your users, you will face a negative impact on the rankings of your site. Similarly, If you have a website with a better mobile interface for your users, you will see that your website gets a boost in the rankings and climbs the ladder faster than usual.

In some cases, Google considers the mobile version of your website as the primary version and takes the desktop version to be the secondary version. With that being said, if both versions of your website are equivalent, it won’t harm the functionality of your website or even its performance for that matter.

SWITCHBOARDS

In reality, it is affecting the way Google interprets your website content and prioritizes crawling along with indexation. This is the actual reason why Google encourages webmasters to have a separate mobile website that has its functionality critical to the mobile interface.

This is where the concept of switchboards originated from. Switchboards have different mobile versions of URLs that are a representation of an altogether alternate tag. Another reason for you to opt for a switchboard is its ability to mislead Google.

If there’s a switchboard that directs toward the existence of a mobile URL version, it is highly likely that Google will not make an effort to crawl and cache the mobile versions of all the pages, as it will mislead Google into displaying mobile URLs.

OPTIMIZE YOUR MOBILE-FIRST INDEXING

In order to rank your website better, you need to focus on the mobile version of your website. That means your mobile version of the site needs to be more responsive.

By more responsive means, the mobile pages should load or perform functions quickly, and the dynamic elements of your mobile website should be operating at an optimal level.

Here’s how you can improve the ranking of your website by giving a touch of magic to your mobile version of the site;

1. CONTENT

The first thing you need to check is whether or not your mobile website has all the important content that is being displayed on your desktop version.

Components of content could include;

• Text

• Videos

• Images

• Formats

One tricky part of the formats is that they should be crawlable and indexable.

2. METADATA

Metadata should be the same on both the desktop version and the mobile version.

This necessarily doesn’t mean that the content should be identical, rather it should be optimized in such a way that the important bits of information on the desktop version should be present on the mobile version of your website. Preferably the character counts if kept shorter will prove to be a charmer.

Note: The keywords in the desktop version should definitely be a part of the mobile version.

3. SOCIAL METADATA

The more accessible it is for the user to access other linked social apps with your website, the more likely they are to access it. With that being said, the social metadata such as Twitter that is on your desktop version should also be included in the mobile version of your website.

4. SITEMAPS

Giving easy access to users will ensure more traffic to your website. Make sure that the links to the sitemaps can be accessed by the users from the mobile version of the website. These could include, the robot’s directives as well as trust signals. For instance, the privacy policy page.

5. SERVER CAPACITY

An essential part of your host server is its capacity.

Your host servers should be able to handle the increased level of crawl rate. All in all, The basic approach to having a better website ranking is to have a compatible mobile version of your website. Google can address the presence of additional ranking information such as the backlinks and put it into consideration in order to better rank your website.