What It Means & Best Practices

What Is Mobile-First Indexing?

Mobile-first indexing means Google’s web crawler prioritizes indexing the mobile version of a website’s content over its desktop counterpart. Which informs rankings.

With Google’s original desktop-first indexing, their system would crawl pages from your site with the desktop and mobile user agent (crawlers).

Then, it would get page information from the desktop page’s content.

And show it in search results if the search engine thought the information was relevant to the user’s query.

But with mobile-first indexing, the indexing system will look at the mobile page instead of the desktop page for information.

What Does Mobile-First Indexing Mean for SEO?

Mobile-first indexing has a significant impact on SEO. It affects how your Google crawls, indexes, and (hopefully) ranks your site.

Which means:

If your site isn’t optimized for a stellar mobile user experience, it could negatively affect how it performs in search results. Or even prevent it from appearing in results.

To check your site’s mobile-friendliness, run a quick audit.

Sign up for a free Semrush account and open Site Audit—it’ll crawl your site with a mobile bot, just like Google.

In the settings, double-check that the crawler is set to “SiteAuditBot-Mobile.”

And, click “Start Site Audit.”

You’ll see a dashboard showing your site’s SEO health.

Like this:

Head to the “Issues” tab, and you’ll see the “Errors,” “Warnings,” and “Notices” holding your site back. And the number of...