When mobile-first indexing is worth the effort

We end up explaining this on discovery calls often enough that it deserved writing down. Mobile-first indexing is not free, and pretending otherwise leads to bad decisions.

Technical fixes remove obstacles; content earns the position. Both are needed and they are not interchangeable. Check it against what you would want a competitor's site to get wrong.

When it is worth it

The mobile version of your page is the one that gets indexed. There is a version of this that is over-engineered, and it is worth avoiding. The practical test is whether someone new to the project could tell, in a minute, that it had been handled.

When it is not

If nothing downstream depends on it and nobody is complaining, it can wait. The teams that handle this well are rarely the ones with the biggest budgets.

How to decide

Parity between mobile and desktop content matters. It is worth being explicit about, because assumptions differ quietly. The practical test is whether someone new to the project could tell, in a minute, that it had been handled.

In practice

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
• Parity between mobile and desktop content matters — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

None of this needs a rewrite. Most of it is a morning's work once someone decides to do it.