Mobile-first indexing is live…here’s what you need to know

Last year, Google announced the migration of sites that followed best practices for mobile displays. Fast-forward to September, and website owners have started receiving emails from Google saying that mobile-first indexing is enabled on their site.

What is Mobile-First Indexing?

Mobile-first indexing essentially means that Googlebot will use the mobile version of a website to assess it for ranking on mobile devices. The change has occurred as previously, Google only used the desktop version of websites to determine their index on search engine result pages (SERP). This meant that mobile users may have had difficulties viewing certain websites that weren’t mobile-friendly, such as having to zoom-in on content or incurring lengthy load time.

How will this affect mobile searches?

Mobile searches are increasing every year, as a report by Search Engine Land found that 57% of traffic in 2017 came from mobile devices. Webmasters will need to ensure that all their pages are fully optimised for mobile, as the Googlebot will crawl for various mobile-friendly factors such as content, hreflang and PageSpeed.

Limitations

Mobile-first indexing, as the name suggests, means that the mobile version of the site will be the primary consideration for indexing, however the desktop site will still determine rankings if a mobile version is not available. Therefore, if you are currently developing a mobile site, it might be best not to have one until it is fully completed, as an incomplete mobile version may hinder your rankings.

Final thoughts

If you have a mobile version of your website that is optimised and is SEO friendly, then great! But if you don’t, it’s recommended to enquire about mobile design, to ensure that you can attract new visitors who are increasingly using mobile search.

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Google My Business Has New Features for Service Area Businesses

Google is making it easier for businesses that service a particular area to get found by consumers searching for services like theirs in Google Maps and Search. In a recent post on The Keyword, SMB Product Lead for GMB Tom Pritchard shared the details.

“Every day, you find a new challenge in a new location across the areas you serve. You might be a plumber or an electrician or a landscaper, but above all you’re a business owner. We’ve recently made a few updates to Google My Business, so you can now share your service areas and information about your business via Google Maps and Search—so you can get found and tap into the many people searching for businesses like yours everyday.”

Developed by the SMB team, these updates also offer enterprise and multi-location brands the opportunity to increase the visibility of your service-area locations in local search. Here’s what’s new…

A New Set-Up Wizard for Service Area Businesses

Google aims to make it easier for service area businesses to get onboarded in GMB with a wizard tailored for the unique needs of businesses without a physical location. It allows the business to specify a service area rather than a static address.

Service Areas Can Be Designated by Zip Code or City

Say you are a plumbing brand with thousands of licensed service area plumbers across the country. You may have dozens within a single large city. You can be precise in specifying which areas of large cities each of the individual businesses serves by using zip codes to define each one.

Or, where multiple cities are being served by a single franchisee or owner, you can have a single GMB presence for them, too.

Edit Your Service Areas As Needed

Once you’ve defined the service area for a location, you are not locked into that area. The settings can be adjusted as needed. Inside the GMB dashboard, you can also edit the “service area” and “storefront address” fields separately, removing one or the other if it is not applicable to that service area business.

Bringing It Together: Manage Your Service Area Businesses At Scale

Claiming, setting up and optimizing your GMB profile for a small business is one thing. Multi-location brands and enterprises face unique challenges in ensuring brand controls and consistency while empowering local franchisees, managers, and owners to manage their local profiles across hundreds or even thousands of service areas.

Open Local Suite is built for brands like yours. Local Pages can provide a dynamic locator and responsive pages for each of your service areas to drive engagement from online search to calls for local service. Local Listings gives you unprecedented control of your online listings across the brand, ensuring the type of data accuracy that instills trust in search engines and consumers alike.

Our team can create a custom solution to claim, set up and optimize all of your service area GMB profiles, enhancing your online presence and driving business results in all of your service areas.

Take advantage of our free local audit today and discover the opportunities awaiting you across all of your local markets.