We’ve been anticipating this change for a while (and it still hasn’t happened yet), but Google’s mobile-first index is still getting closer.

It’s speculated that the mobile-first index will be updated more regularly than the desktop index, and that desktop content and the desktop UX will no longer help you in the mobile world. This means that if you have an abbreviated version of your desktop website that shows to mobile users, you may be in trouble because Google will no longer reference your desktop content for context clues about your brand, content, or products and services.

How can we prepare for this update?

I began exploring this topic in a guest post that I contributed at the end of 2016, when Google first confirmed that a specific mobile index would be rolled out. Five months later, we’re all still left speculating what this might look like or how exactly it’ll impact our SEO.

Luckily, Gary Illyes has since offered us a few pointers on how to prepare for the change:

1. Make sure your mobile site has the content you want to rank for. In other words, since Google will no longer be considering your desktop-only content into which sites show up in the mobile search results, you’ll need to make sure that all important content is present on both desktop and mobile versions of your website (which shouldn’t be an issue if you’re using responsive web design).
2. Make sure structured data are on your mobile site.  Gary didn’t give specifics on what he meant by this, but I’d have to take an educated guess and say that he’s referring to AMP markup, which is really driving the mobile content game nowadays.
3. Make sure rel-annotations are on your mobile site. We also aren’t quite sure what this one means yet either, but Gary assured us that they would be providing more information on this in months to come.

Want to ensure you’re ready for the change? Give me a call and I’d be happy to take a look.