Google prioritizes the mobile version of the site for ranking and indexing. Hence your website should be well-optimized to deliver mobile content that works properly on smartphones tablets or other handheld devices.
This prioritizing is also known as mobile-first indexing. This priority is based on the growing popularity of smartphones the world over.
Importance of Mobile SEO
Almost all use these handheld devices which have literarily become an extension of their hand. Over 60% of people use them for organic search and about 56% of in-store shoppers use them for researching products. Thus, you cannot ignore SEO in these times taking into account the rising popularity. Thus, your focus should be strongly on mobile SEO. There are no separate indexing for mobile and desktop but the hand device gets priority. Although most of the optimization techniques are the same there are on-page factors required to make the website mobile friendly.
Responsive Design
In this case, the same page is served to the desktop and the handheld devices. The HTML code is sent every time however CSS changes to render the handheld version.
Responsive Design Benefits
- Allows rendering of the page using the same URL as that on the desktop site.
- It consumes less time than any other method.
- It reduces room for errors.
- Does not require redirection.
- Requires crawl only once.
- No duplicate content issue.
- Dynamic Serving
- Different HTML or coding is shown for Mobile.
- No URL Change.
- Separate URLs
- Separate URLs are shown for desktop and Mobile
Separate URLs are not preferred by Google and in this to avoid duplicate content canonical has to be used. Hence add rel=”canonical” tags or rel=”alternative”. The latter is placed on the top version while the former is placed in the mobile version. If the relationship tags are not properly set there is a chance of duplicate content.
Whether your mobile setting is correct or not can be checked in Google Search Console. Click on Mobile Utility in the Google Search Console to check. Among the types of page creation Responsive Design is most preferred.