Why is Mobile-First Design Important for SEO?

Users appreciate mobile-first design as they are using mobile devices for web searches more than ever. According to Datareportal, roughly 58% of the global population uses mobile for the internet. 92% of internet users use mobile for search and some users are mobile-only. But mobile-first design isn’t just important for users - it can also impact your visibility in search results.

What is Mobile-First Design?

Mobile-first design means creating a digital experience for mobile users before creating any design for desktops. Mobile-first requires more usability research to create content that is not only relevant and informative but is also user friendly for smaller screens. 

Benefits of Mobile-First Design

There are many benefits of mobile-first design, not only from an SEO perspective but also in terms of the design process and ultimate performance. These include:

Performance

Due to fewer elements and optimised content, the pages will load faster which is essential for usability and maintaining SEO. 

Google Search Results Pages

With the increase in Google searches occurring on mobile devices, Google primarily crawls and indexes pages using a mobile-first approach. 

Scalability

When designing websites for mobile-first it is easier to scale up to desktop, making it possible to add features if required. 

Decreased Bounce Rate

While bounce rates for mobile users are usually higher than desktop rates, this can be improved with a mobile-first design. Users are more likely to engage with a mobile-friendly website.

A Brief History of Responsive Design

Before we go any further, let’s take a look at the history of responsive design and how its importance has increased over the years:

• 1994 - Håkon Wium Lie first proposed CSS

• 1996 - Berners-Lee released the first formal specification for Cascading Style Sheets, level 1 (CSS1)

• 2004 - Cameron Adams wrote a blog post where he detailed a method of using JavaScript to swap out different stylesheets based on the size of the browser window

• 2005 - As mobile devices go online developers create mobile subdomains 

• 2010 - Ethan Marcotte published an article listing three important components for creating a responsive website: fluid grids, flexible images, and media queries

• 2012 - Media queries widely adopted, allowing developers to implement breakpoints to adjust for screen size

• 2019 - Google enables mobile-first indexing by default for all new websites

Google’s Mobile-First Indexing

Mobile-first indexing means that Google primarily uses the mobile version of a web page for indexing and ranking - whether your user is on a mobile device or a desktop. Therefore, it’s important to make your website user-friendly even if the majority of your traffic is desktop users.

In 2020 Google added identical experience for mobile and desktop to their list of best practices. Google’s mobile-first indexing best practices are:

• Ensuring Googlebot can access and render mobile and desktop page content and resources
• Making sure the mobile site contains the same content as the desktop site
• Using the same meta robots tags on the mobile and desktop site
• Using the same metadata on the mobile and desktop site
• Using the same headings on the mobile site and desktop site
• Using the same alt text on the mobile and desktop site
• Making sure the mobile and desktop sites have the same structured data
• Make sure the error page status is the same on the mobile and desktop sites
• Avoiding fragment URLs in the mobile site
• Make sure the desktop pages have equivalent mobile pages
• Verifying both the mobile and desktop sites in Search Console
• Checking hreflang links on separate mobile URLs
• Making sure the mobile site can handle an increased crawl rate
• Making sure the robot.txt directives are the same on the mobile and desktop sites

Mobile-First SEO Content Tips

Personal Search and Conversational Search are the latest evolution in how people search. These are driven by mobile searches and must be considered when creating your search strategy. This includes searches such as ‘Do I Need’, ‘Should I’ and ‘Can I’. Content should be adapted to answer these questions.

Consider the type of content that will be most useful to your reader. If your website is used mostly by mobile users who prefer short-form content, this is the type of content you should be producing. 

Consider the time of day your content will be going live, as this may affect the device that is used to access the content.

The benefits of mobile-first are clear from an SEO perspective, particularly with Google actively encouraging its use. Another huge benefit is ease for your user, which can only be a positive for your business.

If you would like any help with improving your website’s mobile-friendliness, get in touch with SilverDisc.