Mobile-First Indexing: Essential Tips to Avoid Deindexing and Lead Loss

Summary: Loosing leads, sales or online enquiries. We have noted that the March 2024 core update affected many websites around the globe. But the coming core update of 5 July 2024 will have an even bigger impact. Why? google will no longer index a website if that website is hard to access on a mobile device or tablet.

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Fill in your necessary details and a FREE website speed report will be made available to you immediately. This will set out important elements that relate to the mobile first indexing and your website speed. If you require any further support on reviewing this report or if you need help with the implementation of some of these aspects, our digital website speed team are a phone call away.

Page Speed – Is this important for mobile first search and ranking.

Page speed is important and has become more important with the mobile first search emphasis change by google. Why? Website speed directly impacts on a user experience and because user experience is key to ranking online, it therefore has a roll-on impact on search engine optimisation (SEO). Faster website loading times on a mobile device result in lower bounce rates, with this comes higher engagement and therefore improved user satisfaction. More so in the coming months, Googe will prioritise fast loading pages in their top rankings and therefore page speed is becoming a top critical factor in achieving and maintaining high search visibility to those clients potential searching for your product or service.

Google and other search engines continue in its determination to deliver the best possible content to its users. Yes, the searcher and your potential client or customer searching for your product or service.

In the past, if a webpage provided thin, duplicated, or irrelevant content, it might not be viewed as favourable or ranked in a search result query. But Core Updates have not stopped here.

In March 2024, the Google Core Update affected hundreds of websites. This is part of the early “cleaning out” low-quality content and AI-generated nonuser focused website content or spam.

Change is inevitable and it is my view that the update due on 5 July 2024, with have a big impact.

In the world of digital change, the biggest impact on the world wide web of websites and possibly your business website is the change due on 5 July 2024.

Google has stated that it will not be indexing any sites that are difficult to access on a mobile. But what is difficult, this could include: –

• Speed of the website.
• Rendering of the page on multi device sizes. Mobile friendly websites. There are different configurations for mobile friendly sites, these could include responsive design, separate URL’s or dynamic serving.
• Accessing and rendering by Google. It is important to ensure that google can access and render your mobile website page content. What does this mean? Avoid user interaction for lazy load of primary content. Do let google Crawl all your resources and do not block any URL’s with disallow rules.
• Consistency of content across desktop and mobile versions. Keeping your website content the same on all versions of content is important. This not only ensure consistency but avoids the potential of traffic loss. Do not forget to use clear headers with meaning on both mobile and desktop versions of a website.
• Metadata. If a mobile version and desktop versions exist. Ensure the meta data descriptions are on both.
• Ad Placement. Using the “better ADS standards”. Avoid ads that may harm mobile ranking.
• Visual Content. Consider images and video including the format of these images, consistency of use across versions and the quality of these images. Changing URL’s for images and videos each time the page loads is to be avoided.
• Separate URLs. Some sites have separate URLs for desktop and mobile (m-dot sites). It is important to manage error page status and avoid fragment URL’s. Verify both the mobile and the desktop version of the site in search console. Remember to use the correct rel-canonical and rel-alternate link elements.
• Common error trouble shooting. Review your site for common errors that can prevent your mobile – first index. E.g. missing structured data, blocked images, issues with titles and descriptions on pages, non-indexed tags and low-quality images on the website.

This new core update and change is part of a 7-year strategy embarked on by Google. The focus being a complete “mobile-first index” requirement.
Simply interpreted as Google wanting to create a better user experience for searchers.
Why? It stands to reason; more people are using their mobile phones to search. Google has been using a smart phone crawler for a little while, so this is not new. But as of 5 July 2024, if you website’s information and pages are not easily accessed by a mobile device then these pages and website will not be indexed.
To clarify – although this may feel a little confusing, Google has not stated that sites that are not mobile friendly will be deindexed. But it is saying that this is as long as it loads on a mobile.

What should you do.
1. Check your mobile website speed.
2. Check the website core vitals
3. Make sure Google can render your website’s content on all devices.
4. Check your structured data and ensure all metadata is on both versions of your website (if you have multi versions).
Is your website ready? Let’s see….

To help, we have a FREE – Website Speed Checker that will provide you with an instant report.

It is instant and available to you immediately.

So, don’t risk your digital visibility. We are here to help you ensure your site meets the new gold standard – Google’s Mobile-first Index requirement.

We will:-
1. Check your website speed.
2. Look at your website’s core vitals
3. Peek at you content and how it is rendered

And all the above is FREE to you.
Use our free tool today and stay ahead of the July 2024 Google Core Mobile First Index Update.