It has been an eventful year for SEO industry, as we move halfway into 2018. There have been some big and various small SEO optimize changes that we have seen so far, however, none is more significant than the mobile-first indexing.

Well, “evolve or decay” accurately depicts the fast-evolving field of SEO optimize industry. It’s a highly dynamic and pragmatic field, where Google (as the largest search engine) loves to keep digital marketers on their toes.

As said above, there have been various small and large updates to Google algorithms so far this year, however, in this blog, we will be specifically looking at the biggest and most significant updated till now,

“Mobile-First Indexing”.

Google’s Mobile-first indexing was launched back in March, this year and, oh boy had it created a fuzz in the e-commerce industry. Now that it has been close to three months to its launch, let’s have a closer look at what the update is all about and how it is going to impact websites.

Mobile-First Indexing – The Initial Stand

While we are calling it the most significant update in SEO optimize industry, interestingly it wasn’t the most unexpected one. Digital marketing professionals and SEO experts have been anticipated this update for some time and well, most experienced marketers were well prepared in advance for it.

Now, if we look at search trends for Google search engine, stats couldn’t be clearer about the upcoming update. A number of searches made from mobile devices had surpassed desktop searches for some years now, and that’s enough of the fact to convince marketers and e-commerce businesses of the importance of maintaining a strong and dynamic presence for mobile searches.

What’s the real thing behind technicalities?

Google search listing works by bots crawling the content of a website. Traditionally, the bots were made to crawl through the content on display at desktop websites. However, now with mobile-first indexing, Google bots will be crawling the content of mobile versions as well. To put it in the right perspective, websites that want to list higher in mobile searches (which makes up more than half of all the searches) need to be as cautious for their mobile website content as they have been for the desktop version.

This is significant because it was a common practice for most e-commerce businesses to keep a keen focus on the website for desktop, whereas, they tend to neglect to keep mobile versions dynamic and updated. Most of the mobile-websites came with limited functionality and hidden content from the desktop-versions. For instance, if you were searching “more SEO optimize services near me” prior to mobile-first indexing, the number of websites displayed for your search query was based on website’s desktop content.

However, things have changed now and any search query from mobile devices will produce results based on content from mobile devices. This means that businesses with no mobile-presence or unfriendly mobile websites will not be displayed at higher rankings for mobile searches. This is big, as it simply means businesses with unfriendly mobile presence struck-off more than 50% traffic without any chance.

Thereby, it is high time businesses should start taking mobile versions of custom web design seriously and maintain a highly optimized and dynamic presence for mobile searches.