It is very easy to carry mobiles with you as they are lightweight and small in size. From collecting news to doing online shopping, people prefer smartphones in their daily lives. This is the prime reason why most internet traffic comes from mobile devices.
The dramatic rise in the number of mobile users has also brought significant changes in the marketing strategies of several e-commerce businesses. Even Google has started prioritizing mobile-first indexing to tune in with the ongoing trend. As a result, it has become one of the key factors for improving SEO and achieving higher rankings in mobile search results. This also compelled e-commerce organizations to adapt to this change.
In this blog, we are going to shed light on the impacts of mobile-first indexing on e-commerce SEO.
Before we discuss its impacts on SEO, we need to understand what mobile-first indexing is all about.
What Is Mobile-First Indexing?
Mobile-first indexing was declared the default for all websites by Google in March 2021. It is a different process in which Google indexes and gives rankings of your website based on its mobile version. Earlier, Google used the desktop version of your website to index and rank. However, the rise of Internet mobile users has reduced the significance of this approach.
Reasons behind the Growing Importance of Mobile-First Indexing
Google had already switched to mobile-first indexing. There are a few valid reasons that encouraged Google to embrace mobile-first indexing as a factor for indexing and ranking.
Increased Mobile Device Usage:
This is the number one reason why Google was compelled to switch to mobile-first indexing. If reports are to be believed, internet traffic that comes from mobile devices is expected to reach 70 to 72% by 2025. That means it will outperform the desktop versions of websites in the near future.
This major shift requires quick actions to optimize your website for mobile devices, which improves the user viewing experience as well as Google search rankings. It is the need of the hour to create a mobile version of your site to cope with this changing digital world.
Customer Changing Behavior:
Customer behavior has been changing over the years. There has been a drastic change in their search habits. Roughly 64% of consumers prefer mobile devices to search for their products online. This may be the reason for the growing importance of mobile-first indexing in Google search engine results.
Mobile Commerce:
The remarkable expansion of mobile commerce in the global e-commerce market can be attributed to the growing use of mobile devices to purchase and sell products online. This trend has encouraged several store owners to create their own mobile apps with a view to enhancing the customers’ shopping experience and boosting sales.
How Mobile-First Indexing Affects E-commerce SEO?
There won’t be any issue if you build your e-commerce site using a responsive website design. However, if you let your guard down and don’t optimize your content for mobile devices, then users will get a poor experience, which can hurt your SEO rankings.
Having a separate mobile website with suboptimal content can lead to imperfection and leave users frustrated. Googlebot in the mobile-first indexing system generally crawls the mobile version of your website, which will likely affect rankings. Therefore, optimize the content to adapt to mobile screens.
How to Optimize Your Website for Mobile-First Indexing?
Fortunately, Google has introduced a list of effective practices to optimize your site for mobile-first indexing and make sure your e-commerce SEO remains largely unaffected by Google’s new algorithms.
Create a Responsive Layout:
Websites that are not mobile responsive can lead to poor rankings. Build a responsive layout and ensure it is adaptable to various screen sizes. This makes it quite easier for customers to interact with your site, no matter what devices they use. This way, you can deliver them a better experience.
Structured Data:
Structured data allows the Google search engine to understand your site’s content properly and assist Google in ranking your content. Implement structured data markup on both desktop and mobile versions of your website. Most importantly, you have to ensure that the structured data URLs on your mobile version align with the mobile URLs.
Create Meta Title and Descriptions for Both Versions:
Meta titles and meta descriptions are essential to reach your target customers. They allow Google and users to get an overview of your page’s content. Make sure both versions have the metadata that provides users with the same content. The unavailability of metadata on the mobile site can result in lower search engine rankings.
Ensure that meta titles and descriptions are consistent across both desktop and mobile versions of your site.
Perform Regular Website Assessment:
Identify the issues that create barriers to indexing and ranking your website. To fix them, it is important to conduct regular audits of the mobile version of your site. Google Search Console is a tool that helps you track a site’s performance by providing an analysis report on mobile usability.
Check Out Both Versions in Search Console:
To gain access to valuable data in both versions, you have to check both desktop and mobile versions in the search console to analyze their performance in Google search, which enables you to fix issues and achieve a good ranking for your site.
Winding Up:
All in all, mobile-first indexing is a new reality that you have to accept. It has become a necessity for e-commerce organizations to maintain their SEO performance. By focusing on mobile optimization, you can elevate user experience and enhance your site’s visibility on SERPs.
