The Future of Mobile SEO: Preparing for the Next Wave of Search
In the world of search engine optimisation (SEO), one factor above all drives change – updates to the Google indexing algorithms. As the dominant force in online search (more than 90% of all web searches globally happen on Google), success in SEO is overwhelmingly defined by performance in Google search rankings (known as SERPs in the marketing business).
If you want to hit the all-important top spots in Google SERPs, you have to have some grasp of what Google algorithms are looking for when they index and rank pages. So when Google changes those indexing criteria with updates to its algorithms, the world of SEO sits up and takes note.
Sometimes those changes take place incrementally over time. A great example of this is Google’s switch to what it calls mobile-first indexing.
What is ‘mobile-first’ indexing?
This year saw the completion of an eight-year transition which has seen Google retire its ‘desktop Googlebot’, with all indexing from now on carried out exclusively by the ‘mobile Googlebot’.
What does this mean? It means that Google’s indexing algorithms (also known as ‘crawlers’) now look at websites exclusively from a smartphone user’s perspective, rather than from a desktop user’s perspective. This has two important consequences. One, it means that websites that do not render on mobile will not be indexed at all. You have to build a website that works on mobile to even play the SEO game.
Two, it means that mobile performance now reigns supreme in determining search rankings. From an SEO perspective, important ranking metrics like traffic, page speed and site architecture no longer matter on desktop. You still want your websites to perform well on desktop for your users’ benefit, of course. But for SEO purposes, mobile performance is everything. We’ve entered the age of all SEO being mobile SEO.
The long road to mobile-first SEO
The long transition to mobile-first indexing means that no one in the SEO profession can claim to have been taken by surprise by any of this. Moreover, Google doesn’t change its indexing algorithms in a vacuum. The switch to mobile-first indexing could be forecast from a long way off, as soon as it was clear that mobile internet use would overtake desktop.
As things stand, a shade over 60% of all internet traffic comes from mobile devices. And that percentage is only going to get bigger. So the switch to mobile-first indexing makes perfect sense. If the majority of online activity (including web searches) is happening on mobile, then it’s logical to prioritise mobile performance in search rankings.
Despite this, much of the world of web development and digital marketing finds itself still playing catch-up trying to get to grips with mobile SEO best practices. Thinking of websites in mobile-first terms requires a major conceptual shift, affecting everything from content choices, how much of a page is rendered visible at any one time, navigation, load speeds and more.
We can see the lag in web development catching up with the mobile-first concept written largely in the continued discrepancy in how well websites perform on desktop versus mobile. Analysis shows that web pages on average take 70.9% longer to load on mobile than on desktop. Given the fact that, according to Google Consumer Insights, more than half of mobile users will abandon a web page if it doesn’t load in three seconds, that’s a serious drag not just on SEO indexing, but on user satisfaction.
Google also sets the agenda on measuring website performance with a set of metrics it calls Core Web Vitals. Google explicitly states that its search indexing is configured to ‘reward’ pages that hit performance benchmarks across all three Core Web Vital metrics. According to latest tracking figures, 55.3% of websites hit these benchmarks on desktop, versus just 39.1% on mobile.
What does mobile-first SEO look like?
One theory put forward to explain this ongoing gulf between mobile and desktop performance is that website owners (and some developers) are still stuck in a habit of making sites ‘mobile friendly’, rather than mobile first. This essentially means taking a desktop site and, through the practice of responsive design, making sure it renders correctly on mobile devices.
While that might be enough to make sure you at least get indexed by the Google mobile bots, it’s often not enough to impress them when they analyse performance from a mobile perspective. To nail mobile SEO, you likewise have to approach development and optimisation from a mobile perspective, from start to finish.
So, what does that look like in practical terms? One of the core principles of mobile optimisation is thinking about how content, navigation etc works from a mobile-first standpoint. Smartphone screens are a lot smaller than desktop. Things like font size, image size, screen width all impact the user experience, and therefore how search bots evaluate the quality of your site.
Building pages optimised for mobile can be done using responsive design. But rather than start with a desktop design and adapt for mobile, it’s better practice these days to design ‘in mobile view’ and then adapt for desktop. With mobile content, less is more, and things like shorter paragraphs, fewer images and more white space really help with clarity and navigation – both things that search indexing algorithms will assess.
Speaking of a ‘less is more’ approach, this also has a knock-on effect on page speed. It’s not just a case of being prudent about the number and size of images you include. Being concise with your HTML, keeping different elements to a minimum, and avoiding lengthy JavaScript tasks will all help improve Core Web Vital performance on mobile.
With images and video, appropriate compression is essential to ensure they don’t become a drag on page loading and interaction times. You can also use techniques such as ‘lazy loading’, which will only load parts of a page when a visitor scrolls to it, rather than downloading a full page at once.
What’s the future of mobile SEO?
In many ways, Google’s transition to mobile indexing marks the end of the beginning of the mobile SEO journey. We now live in a world where mobile performance simply has to be prioritised for SEO purposes.
From here, it’s important that we look forward and understand not only how mobile indexing might evolve but also how the increasing dominance of mobile web use will shape search habits, which will then in turn shape SEO. In short, it’s not just a case of the mobile web experience being different to desktop. People use the internet differently on mobile, including how they search. Some trends we’re already seeing include:
- Local search: Mobile users have the freedom to search for things online when they are out and about. This has resulted in a big increase in local or location-based search, as mobile users look up businesses, attractions, services etc on the move. One direct impact this has on SEO is that it makes keyword geo-tagging important or includes location-based information in your meta tags and descriptions so search algorithms can index you for location-based searches.
- Context-based search: The greater freedom mobile gives web users to browse and search the internet in lots of different places also means people are using search for lots more different purposes. The arrival of AI tools like natural language processing (NLP), sentiment analysis and machine learning have opened the door to search engines like Google delving into the intent behind searches in order to deliver more relevant results. This context-based analysis creates new demands for context-based optimisation. One current tool at web owners’ disposal is structured data mark-up. This is an advanced tagging approach built into the code of a site which organises information on a page in different ways. It’s important for the kind of ‘rich’ search results you get in local SERPs, with details like location, opening and closing times, user reviews etc flagged up, or for pulling out product information into shopping results. But in general, it plays a key role in helping search algorithms match on-site information to the context or intent of a search.
- Voice search: Finally, one of the biggest SEO shifts of all ushered in by mobile internet use is the growth of voice search. Google’s own data suggests that 27% of mobile web users around the world already use voice search, with no reason to suspect that figure won’t grow and grow. As detailed in this previous blog, voice search creates entirely new SEO demands. People searching using voice tend to make requests using longer, more ‘natural’ queries, rather than the abbreviated keywords typical of text search. This requires web pages to be optimised for longer search terms and phrases. In particular, content organised around answering specific questions performs well for voice search, whether this is built into the main body of a page, or included in FAQs etc.
If you’re looking for an SEO agency in London to help you get to grips with mobile SEO and gain an advantage over your competitors, get in touch with the Key Element team today.
Dominique Childs
