Is My Website Optimized for Google’s Mobile-First Indexing Update?

February 15 , 2018 | BY Matthew Stark

Digital Marketing for Law FirmsGoogle is allowing websites to rank the mobile versions of their websites through its services. The improved exposure on the search engine giant means that your websites will get high page ranks when people search for related terms from their mobile phones.

This is often important for lawyers, as people generally perform an initial search on their phones and may select a suitable lawyer from the starting results that they get from Google.

Websites that are already responsive and designed to serve users both from desktop and mobile face no problems with mobile-first indexing. However, here are a few elements that you can check to ensure that your website is fully optimized for this mobile-based Google indexing update:

Setting Up a Mobile Version of Your Law Firm Website

Ensure that the mobile version of your website has the same content level as that of your desktop one. Remember, the text may be the same, but the images and the videos must also be properly present in an indexable format for easy access to Google’s crawler. Set up the website data in a structured manner, where all URLs are updated to ensure they point to the mobile version pages. Separate mobile URLs do not require a changing scheme as the link relations present between different mobile versions of a website can also be identified and examined by Google during Mobile-first indexing.

Meta Details

The metadata should be present on both versions of your website. The titles and descriptions should match on both versions of your web pages. These details provide information about the nature of the content and are recording during the indexing process and served to users on search engines. There is also the case of handling languages.

The right hreflang links must be present as they provide the ability to use regional versions of your website, as well as international ones. All links for language references should point to the right mobile URLs, and similarly done as you would for your desktop URLs.

Server Capacity

Your mobile website is ready for indexing when you ensure that it is hosted on a server that is fully capable of handling additional load associated with the significantly higher crawl rate. Websites that have a separate host for their mobile version may face problems when the crawler acts on them to attain information.

The best way to resolve it is to hire a reputed digital marketing company and create an optimized website that has a responsive web design and therefore, can serve desktop and mobile visitors dynamically through a single platform.

The Transition

Google describes that it is using the principles above to perform an independent evaluation of mobile websites and then transition them for mobile-based indexing when they are ready for it. The search engine has already started this process and will gradually include more websites in it.

Hiring a lawyer marketing agency is the right choice if you are looking to gain the benefits of mobile-first indexing on the search engine giant.

Contact FORWARD Lawyer Marketing today at (888) 590-9687 for more information.