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Mobile SEO: what mobile-first indexing means for your site

Mobile SEO is making sure your site works well on phones, because Google mainly crawls and indexes the mobile version of pages (mobile-first indexing).

Aalhad, Founder, SEO·AEO·GEO

Founder, SEO·AEO·GEO

Builds SEO·AEO·GEO and writes the crawler, schema, and citation research published here.

Mobile SEO is making your site work well for people on phones, and for Google, which uses the mobile version of your content for indexing and ranking. This is called mobile-first indexing: Googlebot crawls primarily as a smartphone.

So if your mobile pages show less content, fewer links or less structured data than your desktop pages, the mobile version is what Google sees.

Mobile SEO checklist

  1. Use a responsive design: the same HTML and URL for every device, adapted with CSS. Google recommends it as the easiest to maintain.
  2. Include the viewport meta tag so the page scales to the screen.
  3. Show the same main content, headings and structured data on mobile as on desktop.
  4. Don't hide important content behind interactions that need JavaScript to load it.
  5. Make text readable without zooming and buttons easy to tap.
  6. Avoid intrusive pop-ups that cover the content.
  7. Keep pages fast on mobile networks. See Core Web Vitals.
  8. Don't block CSS, JavaScript or images in robots.txt; Google needs them to render the page.
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">

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  • Viewport
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FAQ

What is mobile-first indexing?+

Google mainly uses the mobile version of a page's content, crawled with its smartphone crawler, for indexing and ranking.

Do I need a separate mobile site?+

No. Google recommends responsive design, one set of URLs and HTML for all devices, as the simplest setup.

What do mobile SEO services include?+

Usually a mobile usability and speed audit, fixes to layout, viewport and content parity, and Core Web Vitals improvements.

Sources

  1. Mobile site and mobile-first indexing best practices — Google Search Central
  2. Understanding Core Web Vitals and Google search results — Google Search Central