Why SEO Experts Are Claiming Smartphone-Based SEO To Be The Future Of Organic Ranking
The best judge of a website’s SEO quality is not a group of SEO experts. Rather, it is Google. If your website ranks high in Google’s search results then it is obvious that your SEO is top-notch. If it doesn’t, then regardless of what your SEO team states, their strategy is not working.
Now is the time to update SEO strategies more than ever. Last year Google announced its ‘mobile-first index’. To break it down in simple terms, Google will be considering how well a website or page functions on a smart device while ranking it in their search results. And by 2021, this will be the primary factor based on which Google will be ranking a website’s SEO, for both desktop and mobile-based searches.
Even if your website is not meant to be a smartphone-centric one, it will need to be optimized for such a platform. The three primary aspects that Google will be considering are:
- The performance of a website on a smart device.
- The content placement as viewed by a smart device user.
- And the user-friendliness of the website on a platform meant for smart devices.
So, if you have an SEO strategy for your website in place but it is not scaled to meet smart device requirements, you are definitely going to lose out on Google ranking.
Steps to take
SEO experts from all over the world have put together a list of actions that website owners and developers need to take in order to make sure they don’t lose out on the much-valued organic traffic.
The most important among these include:
- Structuring the data on your website (including metadata) to make sure it matches mobile standards.
- Formatting images and videos so that they load quickly when opened on smart devices.
- Making sure that all information and other aspects from the desktop website are available on the mobile site as well.
- Mentioning that your website is mobile-friendly and uses responsive design in the Google developer documentation.
- Selecting mobile-centric keywords as part of your SEO strategy.
These are the primary steps one can take to ensure that their website is mobile SEO friendly. While mobile SEO is not widely different from desktop SEO, there are various additional aspects that one needs to look into while developing a mobile site.
What’s next?
The Google ‘mobile-first index’ is still not out in its entirety. It is only by 2021 that the whole process will be operational, but the process of ranking websites based on their smart device user-friendliness has already begun.
More mobile-centric ranking algorithms will become part of Google’s process in the near future, so having a mobile developer team at hand along with a professional SEO company will serve website owners well.
The world is clearly moving towards a smartphone-centric era, and Google has responded to this change. Now it is the responsibility of SEO experts, website developers, and website owners to respond to these changes as well.