How to get mobile-first indexing right
This is cheap to get right at the start and expensive to retrofit. The short answer to mobile-first indexing is that it is mostly a sequence of small decisions, not one big one.
Technical fixes remove obstacles; content earns the position. Both are needed and they are not interchangeable. Anything you cannot measure here, you are deciding by taste, which is fine as long as everyone knows it.
Why it matters
The mobile version of your page is the one that gets indexed. That sounds obvious written down. It is still the thing most often skipped. It is worth deciding this deliberately rather than inheriting whatever the last person set up.
The steps
- Establish what you have today before changing anything
- Content hidden on mobile carries less weight
- Parity between mobile and desktop content matters
- Write down the decision so the next person does not re-litigate it
Parity between mobile and desktop content matters. Small and consistent beats large and occasional here. The teams that stay on top of it are the ones who put it on a calendar rather than a wish list.
Where to go from here
How to tell if yours is fine
Search engines are trying to answer a question, so the pages that answer questions clearly tend to do well. Three things worth confirming about mobile-first indexing before you move on:
- Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
- The mobile version of your page is the one that gets indexed — and you know whether that is true here
- There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped
Worth checking on your own setup before it becomes someone else's problem to fix.