Which is Better in Organic Traffic? Mobile or Desktop?

Last year in July 2019, Google rolled out its much awaited algorithm “Mobile First Indexing” which states that Google will index new website on the basis of Mobile Version of the websites. Mobile First indexing was applied for newly launched website on or after 1 July 2019 but it will mandatory for whole web till September 2020.

Day by day technology developed & smartphone users overtook the desktop users. This trend is increasing day by day.

This made Google to implement its Algorithm “Mobile First Indexing”, as more than 50% searches in google from mobile search. Google Started working on “Mobil First Indexing” & used Smartphone Googlebot to crawl the webpages. They found that most of the websites are good for “Mobile First Indexing”.  Reason behind this was that mobile searches are more than 50% of all devices search. A report in 2019 shows that mobile traffic generates more than 60% organic traffic of whole devices including tablets.

What does this mean to you, the SEO?

This should cement the idea that websites should be mobile-first and not just responsive. Page load times on mobile also play an important role, with Google penalizing sites that offer a too-slow-experience for users.

                                              Mobile Share of Organic Searches

More and more users are using Mobile devices to access the internet & this trend is growing day by day. It is obvious that mobile devices are easy to handle & people carry all time. This leads mobile devices over desktop in natural search or organic search. As a SEO, you should follow the Mobile First Indexing algorithm to bring more traffic towards your website.

Make Sure That Googlebot Can Access & Render Your Content

      Use the same meta robots tags on the mobile and desktop site: Don’t use different meta robots on desktop & mobile version, Google may fail to crawl and index your page when your site is enabled for mobile-first indexing

      Don't lazy-load primary content upon user interaction: Googlebot won't load content that requires  user interactions (for example, swiping, clicking, or typing) to load.

      Let Google crawl your resources: You should not disallow those resources urls on mobile which are different from those of desktop site.For mobile first indexing, it is necessary to not block your resources urls for mobile.

Make Sure That Content is the Same On Desktop & Mobile

Make sure that mobile & desktop content should be equivalent, any less content on mobile site will harm you in SERP as all indexing will come from mobile sites only. So, keep the clear headings & content on both the sites same.

Check Your Structure Data

If you have structure data on your website, then it should be same on both versions of your site.

Use Correct urls in structure data & Make sure that URLs in the structured data on the mobile versions are updated to the mobile URLs.

If you use Data Highlighter to provide structured data, regularly check the Data Highlighter dashboard for extraction errors.

Put the Same Metadata On both Versions of Your Site

Make sure that the descriptive title and meta description are equivalent across both versions of your site.

Check your images (Visual Content)

Make sure that the images on your mobile site follow the image best practices

      Use high quality images, Don’t use images that are too small or have a low resolution on the mobile site.

      Use supported format or tags of images

      Don't use URLs that change every time the page loads for images, as google will not able to process and index such resources which is changing its urls constantly.

      Both alt text of both mobile & desktop site should be same. Use same descriptive alt text for both versions.

Page Content quality of mobile & desktop site should be same. Use the same descriptive titles, captions, filenames, and text relevant to the images on the mobile site as you do for the desktop site.

Check your videos

Make sure that the videos on your mobile site follow the video best practices,

      Don't use URLs that change every time the page loads for your videos.  Google won’t be able to  process and index your resources properly if you use constantly changing URLs for them.

       Use a supported format for your videos and put videos in supported tags.

      Use the same video structured data on both your mobile site and desktop site.

      Place the video in an easy to find position on the page when viewed on a mobile device.

We know that Mobile First Indexing will be mandatory for all website till September 2020, so we should focus on Mobile version of our website. It means our Website should be Mobile First Indexing not only responsive.

Follow the above guidelines for your websites & web pages that will brings more traffic to mobile as well as desktop searches.

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Google’s Mobile First Indexing

Google officially started July 1, 2019, it’s most awaited updates “Mobile First Indexing”. Mobile-first indexing means Google predominantly uses the mobile version of the content for indexing and ranking. Previously, before launching this algorithm Google used the desktop version of a page's content when evaluating the relevance of a page to a user's query whether on mobile or desktop searches. It's important to note that there isn't a separate mobile-first index; Google Search continues to use only one index. Google Search continues to show the URL that is the most appropriate to users (whether it's a desktop or mobile).

To be clear, only brand new sites Google is not yet aware of, will be indexed using mobile-first indexing by default. Other sites that have already moved over to mobile-first indexing will also continue to be indexed using mobile-first indexing. But older sites which is not yet migrated will continue to be indexed the old-fashion way, desktop-first indexing, until those sites are ready. Google said “For older websites, we’ll continue monitoring and evaluating pages for their readiness for mobile-first indexing, and will notify them through Search Console once they’re seen as being ready”.

In simple words mobile first indexing means that when a new website is registered it will be crawled by Google’s smartphone Googlebot, and its mobile-friendly content will be used to index its pages, as well as to understand the site’s structured data and to show snippets from the site in Google’s search results, when relevant.

Search engine optimizer should not confuse this mobile-first indexing with “Mobilegeddon” algorithm or Mobile Friendly updates of Google in 2014. Mobilegeddon algorithm was beneficial to mobile-friendly websites & pages into mobile search only while mobile-first indexing is beneficial in both mobile and as well as in desktop searches. Latter one is related to the indexing of mobile-friendly content the same for both mobile & desktop searches.