In 2020 Google made the decision to change the way in which it indexes and ranks websites in its search results. Originally scheduled for September 2020 the change was pushed back due to the economic turbulence that is COVID-19. Traditionally they used the desktop view to rank how your site looks and performs. As the world has shifted towards mobile viewing Google needs to put mobile-first. So now from March 2021 Google will rank the mobile version of your site instead.
If your site comes back as mobile-friendly there is nothing urgent to do.
However, if your site is not mobile-friendly you will need to make some urgent adjustments. Depending on the results you may need to make a few simple changes to images/text/spacing or you could need to rebuild your site entirely.
This may well be the case for the past, but sadly times have moved on. Keeping up with new trends has become the norm for websites that want to thrive. The traditional way of building websites and then “bolting on” a mobile version later has become a thing of the past. After March 2021 the mobile version of these sites will cause more problems than they are worth, with desktop viewers being sent to the mobile site as standard.
There are a few simple things you can do to make sure you are ready for the switch.
- Make sure that the primary content on your site is the same on desktop and mobile versions.
- Be aware of any content that is blocked on mobile.
- Pay close attention to meta tags and lazy loading on mobile sites.
- Make sure your images have appropriate quality for desktop and mobile, alt attributes are in place and image URLs are consistent between desktop and mobile versions.
Mobile-first indexing will be forced on every site in March 2021 regardless of whether you are ready or not.
The impact of this is that your Google ranking will suffer greatly. You will appear further down the list of search results below every one of your competitors who are mobile-friendly. As you can imagine this will have a detrimental effect on businesses that rely on website traffic.
