As of March 2021, Googlebot does not crawl your website's desktop version but only opens it for mobile users. This makes it more difficult for desktop visitors to find your site in searches, especially since most web content on the internet is tailored to suit their mobile platform.
While the sweeping move from mobile-first to mobile-only is a welcome improvement for websites, it makes sense. More than 55 percent of global web traffic is mobile, and nine in ten global internet users access the web via a mobile device.
However, the more pressing question has to be: Is your site mobile-friendly enough for mobile-first search engine crawlers to find?
Google's Mobile-Friendly Test Tool
Are you worried that your site isn't mobile-friendly enough? If you still haven't checked, take the mobile-friendly test.
Google's mobile-friendly test tool is a helpful way to determine whether your site passes Google's mobile-friendly standards. The tool will examine your site structure and show whether Google can crawl and index your pages. Once you've passed, there are several things you could do to ensure you continue passing, including the following:
Adding canonical tags
Adding Mobile Meta Tags
Using hreflang tags
Adding seamless redirects
Using AMP
Retaining site speed
Scrolling down to the bottom of this article, you'll find a checklist of things you can do for each strategy mentioned above. After making your site mobile-friendly, you may want to rerun your site through Google's Mobile-Friendly Test Tool.
What Makes a Mobile-Friendly Site?
If you're not sure whether your site is mobile-friendly, you need to understand what Google defines as a mobile-friendly site. The search giant has defined five characteristics that make a site mobile-friendly. These characteristics and their respective page elements help Google's crawlers and search engine bots understand and execute the tasks needed to make your site mobile-friendly.
To be considered mobile-friendly, a site needs to be:
Responsive: This means that the site will respond to the device's screen size a user is on, regardless of the platform.
Fast loading: It shouldn't take forever to load a mobile-friendly site.
Mobile-friendly: The site is designed and structured to read and navigate on a mobile device.
Fit for a mobile screen: The site must stack appropriately on all mobile devices.
Appeal to an on-the-go audience: Google wants your mobile-friendly site to be an engaging experience on a mobile device and should offer an excellent user experience to mobile users.
Breaking Down Google Mobile-Friendly Test Results
After checking your site through Google's mobile-friendly test tool, Google will show a detailed report of your site's mobile-friendliness. The report will show you the number of issues you have with the above characteristics.
The report will also show you what you can do to fix the issues. While not all problems may need to be corrected immediately, you should go through the report to see what you need to fix and focus on the errors that may negatively impact your SEO.
Conclusion
Have you checked whether your site is mobile-friendly? If not, you should run your site through the mobile-friendly test tool and identify the problem areas. After making any corrections, you should run your site through the test tool again and see if it passed. You could address your issues with the mobile-friendly checker before rerunning the tool if you didn't pass.
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