For those of you that don’t know, Google hosts regular hangouts for the SEO community to discuss the latest and greatest search techniques. In the final hangout of 2016, Webmaster Trends Analyst, John Mueller was asked to give advice to SEOs for the year ahead – assuming they did everything right last year.
He said the main thing to focus on in 2017 is Google’s mobile-first index that will soon be rolling out. He implied that most SEOs are really good at on-page SEO on desktop, but they also need to apply the same on-page SEO techniques to the mobile version of the site. Of course, if you’re using responsive design, you don’t need to worry too much about this.
Mueller added that SEO tools need to move from looking purely at the desktop version to the mobile version of the site.
Below is a video embed of the conversation:
“I would say mobile, mobile and mobile. That’s easy right? No.”I think with the change for the mobile-first index, one of the big things that I suspect SEOs will want to look at is how mobile pages are optimised for search. If you’ve done on-page SEO for your desktop site then usually you spend a lot of time looking at the HTML code for your desktop pages but the mobile page is essentially just like a mobile version of the same page, you haven’t really spent time to figure out to optimise the the code.
“All of these these third-party tools that you’re using to evaluate your pages, kind of the understanding of on-page SEO, make sure that you apply that to the mobile version of the page as well and don’t just focus on what the desktop offers.”
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