Optimizing for Mobile-First Indexing: Key Steps for Website Owners

Are you looking to optimize your website? Then, one of the first things you should consider includes mobile-first indexing. As an SEO expert in Pune, we see many reasons to do it. But the most significant ones include the increasing use of mobiles to surf the internet and that even Google has shifted its focus from desktop to mobile-first indexing. 

Both are important for you as a website owner. As for the latter in particular, Google primarily uses the mobile version of a website’s content to index and rank a particular website. Easier said than done, you must be wondering how to do it. Agencies providing SEO services in Pune like BrainMine can handhold you in doing it. However, here are five essential steps every website owner should know.

Assess Your Site’s Mobile-Friendliness

At the outset, examine the mobile-friendliness quotient of your website. To do so, Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test tool can help you. The tool helps you gauge your site’s performance and mobile phones and provide improvement recommendations. Additionally, you should use Google Search Console to identify mobile usability issues and resolve them timely to avoid letting them ruin your website’s user experience.

Maintain Consistency

Next, see if your site is consistent across mobile and desktop. Google uses your website’s mobile version as the primary information source. Hence, you should check and ensure that the mobile version of your website delivers the same experience as its desktop version. One of the keys to doing it is using the same meta tags, canonical tags, and structured data across both versions to avoid differences in performance and experience.

Optimize Website Performance and Speed

Mobile users expect quick browsing and a blissful website navigation experience. Accordingly, website performance and speed improvement can involve reducing its loading time, increasing its responsiveness, and enhancing its interactivity. 

As an SEO agency in Pune, we recommend using Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool to enhance your site’s speed and receive expert advice for improvements. Some common ways to improve website performance include using a content delivery network (CDN), implementing lazy loading, enabling browser caching, compressing code, optimizing images and videos, and using AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages).

Keep the Design and Layout Optimized

Another crucial aspect of mobile-first indexing is considering optimizing the design and layout of the website for mobile devices. It refers to ensuring seamless navigation, readability, and small-screen interactivity. You can do it through a responsive web design. It enables your site to adapt to varying screen sizes and orientations. 

Some techniques include using a clear and straightforward menu with visible and legible fonts, highlighting elements with visible colors, using short paragraphs, precise yet comprehensive headings and subheadings, titles, bullet points, lists, etc.

Evaluate Your Website’s Performance

Check your website’s mobile performance regularly. You can use Google Analytics to track your site’s mobile-based traffic, engagement, and conversion rates. Additionally, you can use Google Search Console to assess your site’s mobile-first indexing status and look for errors pulling your rankings down. Furthermore, you should stay abreast of Google’s mobile-indexing policy, changes to it, introduction of new algorithms, etc.

Being mobile-friendly isn’t good anymore but imperative. The above steps can help you optimize your website for mobile indexing. Although the above pointers may appear generic to many, implementing them can involve various technicalities. Hence, dealing with them effectively and appropriately will require an SEO agency in Pune. 

BrainMine can serve as one. Be it content writing services in Bangalore or SEO services in Pune, BrainMine excels as a digital marketing agency with its proven track record, over 12 years of experience, and phenomenal results. 

Please email us at info@brainminetech.com to discover how we can help you keep your website performant and optimized at all times.