Getting your site ready for mobile-first indexing

Just in time for Christmas, (sending webmasters into a frenzy) Google has announced via its Webmaster Central Blog that they have begun taking steps to roll-out the Googlebot to start crawling sites and grading them against the mobile-first index algorithm.

Basically, this means that now the Smartphone Google bot will take priority over the Desktop one and the snippets in the results pages, as well as content from the cache, will be from mobile versions of your site.

Making sure your site is making use of responsive web design, correctly implementing dynamic content serving and using structured data (that’s schema-mark-up if you haven’t heard of it before) is imperative now if you want to get ahead and boost your SEO rankings.

How do you check your site?

There are a couple of free pieces of software you can use to test your site, depending on the results, you can decide if you need professional SEO help to take action.

Try these web links to test if your website is mobile friendly and contains structured data;

• https://search.google.com/test/mobile-friendly
• https://search.google.com/structured-data/testing-tool/u/0/

Google have said that they intend to roll out the bots to a handful of sites at a time, to give webmasters time to implement any changes that may be needed. Sites that are already built responsively and optimised for SEO (like all the ones we build!) can rest easy and know that when the bots attack, it will be good news for your search rankings.