What to ask your agency about mobile-first indexing

We end up explaining this on discovery calls often enough that it deserved writing down. If you are briefing an agency or a freelancer on mobile-first indexing, these questions are worth asking early.

Search work compounds slowly, which is why it gets abandoned about two months before it would have paid off. If two people in the business would answer this differently, that gap is the actual problem.

Questions worth asking

• Who will actually do this work, and have they done it before?
• How will we know afterwards whether it worked?
• What happens if it needs changing in a year?
• What are you assuming that we have not confirmed?

What a good answer sounds like

The mobile version of your page is the one that gets indexed. Small and consistent beats large and occasional here. It is worth deciding this deliberately rather than inheriting whatever the last person set up.

Parity between mobile and desktop content matters. The teams that handle this well are rarely the ones with the biggest budgets. If it only works because one person remembers to do something, it does not work yet.

How to tell if yours is fine

Technical fixes remove obstacles; content earns the position. Both are needed and they are not interchangeable. 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

The point is not perfection, it is knowing which of these you have consciously chosen to skip.