📱 Mobile-First Indexing: Adapting Your Startup's SEO Strategy

Hey!

🤔 Why Mobile-First Indexing Matters for Your Startup

Mobile-first isn't just about looking good on phones and smaller screens. It's crucial because:

1. 🔍 Google primarily uses the mobile version of your site for ranking and if your mobile site lacks content present on the desktop version, you could be missing out on ranking higher.

2. 📈 Mobile traffic often exceeds desktop. In 2023, over 60% of web traffic comes from mobile devices. So chances are your leads are seeing your site on their phones first.

3. 🏆 It affects your overall search performance. In fact a mobile-friendly site could outrank a desktop-only competitor, even for desktop searches.

🚀 2 Strategies to Ace Mobile-First Indexing

1. 🚀 Optimize for Speed

Mobile users are often, well, mobile when they use their phones, which means they likely have less patience for slow-loading sites. Check my last post on a more in-depth guide on how to boost your sites speed, but as a quick overview:

• 🗜️ Compress images, use tools like TinyPNG to reduce image file sizes without losing quality.

• 🧹 Minify code, remove unnecessary characters from your HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to speed up load times.

• ⏳ Leverage browser caching
  For example: Set your logo to be cached for a week so returning visitors don't need to reload it.

2. 👆 Improve Mobile UX

Make your site easy to use on small screens:

• 👀 Use readable font sizes. This includes checking things like ensuring your body text is at least 16px on mobile devices.

• 🎯 Make buttons and links "thumb-friendly" and use a minimum touch target size of 48px for buttons and important links.

• 🍔 Implement a user-friendly navigation
  For example: use a "hamburger" menu on small screens rather than accessive dropdowns.

• Use Webflow for your landing page, or another responsive website builder to help with mobile UX

💪 Quick Win: Test Your Mobile-Friendliness

Use Google's Lighthouse tool to quickly check how your site performs on mobile devices.

Action Steps:

1. 📊 Check your mobile vs. desktop traffic from Google in Google Analytics to get an idea of how Google views your site’s mobile UX.

2. 🔍 Use Google Search Console to identify any mobile usability issues

3. 📱 View your top 5 pages on various mobile devices (or use Chrome's device emulator) and note areas for improvement

-Hunter

P.S. Found this helpful? Share it with a fellow startup founder. You may earn a new backlink! 😉