Mobile-First Indexing and SEO:

Mobile-First Indexing and SEO: Mobile-First Indexing was implemented in November 2016. The goal was to create a higher level of value for mobile users. The goal was to use the mobile version of a site’s content to rank pages from that site. With this change, Google will primarily index mobile content and use that to decide how to rank its results, regardless of whether you’re on desktop or mobile. There will no longer be any “mobile-friendly” adjustments done just for mobile users. Effectively, if you’re not mobile-friendly, that will have an impact even on how you appear to desktop searchers. While ultimately the goal was to provide a great experience for mobile and desktop users the focus was placed on the mobile experience and its recent explosion. In December of 2018, half of all sites in Google’s search results were from mobile-first index, and in March 2021 google required all sites to switch over to mobile-first indexing.

Now because of Mobile-First Indexing websites will not be accessible to mobile users without complying with the MFI. In order to best position yourself with MFI in terms of SEO you must have a Responsive design, Dynamic Serving, and Separate URLs

• Responsive design ensures that the same HTML code is served on the same URL regardless of the user’s device, but the content is displayed differently based on screen size. Google recommends this design pattern as it is easy to implement and maintain.
• Dynamic serving utilizes the same URL for all devices, relying on user-agent sniffing and the Vary: user-agent HTTP response header to deliver different versions of HTML to different devices.
• Separate URLs serve different HTML to each device on separate URLs, using user-agent and Varied HTTP headers to redirect users to the appropriate version of the site.

Ultimately the Mobile-First Index helps give websites higher visibility and helps them provide more utility and value to customers. In many ways this aspect of a website is mandatory, however mobile traffic makes up 58.21% of global internet traffic weso ignoring this puts your domain at risk of going completely unnoticed.