New research shows that shoppers are less likely to go through with an online purchase if they are using a phone or tablet.

The findings come from a study conducted by the University of East Angelia and published in the Journal of Business Research which looked at why cart abandonment is much higher on mobile apps then desktop-based online shopping.

According to data from research Criteo, 46% of global ecommerce traffic come from mobile devices in Q2 2016. However, only 27% of these initiated purchases were completed.

Researchers from the university looked at online shopping data from Taiwan and the US. They found that consumers are much more likely to use mobile apps as a research and curation tool rather than a purchasing tool.

Influencer marketing really came into vogue in 2017. While the principle of utilising famous people to sell your products is nothing new, the concept has undergone a major evolution in the last few years as it merged with social media. 

Instagram has positioned itself right at the heart of this growing section of digital marketing. As a mainly picture-based network with around 800 million users (as of September 2017), it is perhaps no surprise that Instagram is so suited to influencer marketing. The site also boasts a relatively young user base, being popular among teenagers and young adults.

Recently, the data science team of marketing software company Klear analysed over 1.5 million Instagram posts, all of which were tagged with an #Ad hashtag during 2017.

The results show that 2017 was a year that Instagram really began to cement its place as the premier site for influencer marketing.

The practice of “ghosting” consumers, or breaking all contact following a purchase, is one of the main reasons consumers switch to other retailers.

Narvar and YouGov surveyed around 3,000 UK consumers and found that retailers are losing out on repeat customers by focusing all of their efforts on getting people to buy from them. By failing to communicate with customers once the purchase is complete, retailers are often blowing the chance of creating a loyal customer.

Among the respondents, the number one aggravation reported was companies that do not provide clear and accurate information about the status of an order. 25% listed this as their top annoyance. 65% would be put off ever engaging with a brand again if it poorly communicated bad news like a late delivery.

A third of respondents said that they would definitely not use the retailer again if they did not provide accurate order tracking or follow up a purchase with necessary content like guides.

Post-purchase experience

The kind of important, post-purchase communications that many retail brands are failing to provide their customers are an accurate estimation of delivery date, and prompt notifications of any delays or changes to the order.

61% of those surveyed said that they expected fast and direct communications following purchase as a standard. This attitude was most keenly demonstrated by millennials and the over 55s. 10% would like to receive follow up content such as suggestions for how to use the product or other related purchases.

And, perhaps reflecting the UK preference for good manners, 20% of respondents would like a simple ‘thank you’ from brands they buy products from.

“These findings really highlight that the eCommerce journey does not just stop when a customer clicks the buy button,” Amit Sharma, CEO, Narvar, comments.

“Retailers who fail to appreciate the importance of the post-purchase experience are missing out on really developing a loyal customer base and the financial benefits that go along with that.”

By Colm Hebblethwaite

The term ‘ICO’ or initial coin offering burst into the collective consciousness in a big way in 2017. The funding strategy went from being a novel idea thought up in the cryptocurrency and blockchainspace to a way for companies to raise millions of dollars in a matter of hours.

With the money raised through ICOs in the last year rocketing to over $3,000,000,000, it is not surprising that an increasing number of companies are looking to explore the potential to get involved. And, while the vast majority of ICOs have been tech-related, companies from other sectors are increasingly finding success in the space.

indaHash, a Warsaw-based influencer marketing company, recently launched an ICO where they looked for investors to put money into the indaHash Coin cryptocurrency.  The results were pretty astonishing: 53,000 ETH raised (which equated to around $60 million in value at the time) and the pre-ICO hard cap (when the total number of created coins has sold out) in only 4 days.

We caught up with CEO and co-founder Barbara Soltysinska to talk about how the influencer marketing platform made a bold step into the world of cryptocurrencies.

What was the level of knowledge about ICOs and cryptocurrencies before settling on that strategy?

“In our case, the ICO is less a funding strategy, and more of an innovative approach to grow our company and be ahead of the competition. We want indaHash to eventually become a transparent and decentralized platform for influencer marketing campaigns, fueling the needs of influencers, brands and follower activities.

“In terms of knowledge, we cooperate with the best advisors and crypto-influencers if the industry, working on the best solutions with them for our product.”

Did you encounter scepticism about using an ICO?

“We had both, I think. Many people thought it was a great idea, but of course you will always encounter people who question your decisions. Mostly because they don’t understand it and as you know, many people are skeptical of cryptocurrency. Lucky for us, our ICO went very well so we proved the skeptics wrong.”

What tactics did the company use to market the ICO?

“We used several tactics to promote our ICO such as traditional media outreach (we were featured on Forbes, CNBC, etc.)  and promotions on our social channels. But, as an influencer marketing company, it was an obvious choice to use people influential in the crypto social media space to help us.

“People go to YouTube for crypto-related news, so we partnered with over 100 different YouTubers from around the globe to review our ICO. This lead to almost 5k videos on YouTube for ‘indaHash ICO’.

“We also organized several press trips and invited more than 40 crypto YouTubers to our HQ in Warsaw so they could see our working business up close and personal, meet with our employees and get first access interviews with myself on the project. Additionally, we worked really hard to grow our Telegram group to over 13k members. We made sure we had staff around the clock updating our members and answering questions because keeping open communication when conducting and ICO is crucial. Another cool thing we did was send out a newswire the day our ICO launched and had our image displayed in Times Square.”

What were the biggest challenges/lessons learned during and after the process?

“We have a very intensive and detailed whitepaper. Putting this together in a way that was on brand for us, but also visually stimulating and informative for those reading it was a big challenge. We worked really hard on it for months and thankfully, received so many compliments on it, with many saying it was the best whitepaper they’ve ever come across. That’s a big, important lesson for those reading this – make your whitepaper stand out!

“And, of course, there’s a lot of pressure to succeed when doing an ICO. It’s challenging not to question yourself and your ability to be able to hit your goals, so a big lesson here is to never stop. During our pre-and main ICO, my team and I worked really hard to keep the momentum going with marketing and the tactical issues of the token distribution. I learned to really lean on my ICO team and advisors because everyone played a big role in making it happen.”

What was behind the decision to pay influencers in IDH tokens? What are the benefits of this approach?

“Our goal at indaHash is to create innovative solutions according to market demand. We believe in a decentralized vision of the influencer space where brands and influencers can cooperate in a transparent and secure way.

“As the biggest influencer marketing platform in the world (450,000 influencers registered working with clients such as Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, Unilever etc.), we decided to move to a blockchain based approach to achieve this goal. We want to develop our platform and give influencers and brands the possibility to run campaigns via smart contracts and use indaHash tokens as a remuneration and reward solution.

“Imagine an influencer who wants to run a campaign and creates an auction via smart contract and brands can bid for the post, or brands creating campaigns via indaHash smart contracts with a blocked amount of IDH coins as a reward and influencers applying to the campaign creating posts and receiving payments in a fast, secure and trusted way. Imagine performance campaigns for influencers based on referral programs where influencers receive commission in IDH and see rankings of other influencers engaged in a fully transparent way. But to do all that influencers and brands need a user-friendly interface and technology created solely for their needs. This is our vision of indaHash as a solution provider, creating unique and useful technology for both parties.”

What is the company planning to do with the money raised?

“The funds will be used to grow our company even more dynamically, expand to new markets, acquire new influencers faster and become a dominating market leader in terms of influencer marketing activities.

“At this point we’re ahead of competition not only in terms of money – but also in terms of our vision that the world is shifting from old centralized media to decentralized micro-publishers. And we want to be a key player in this new media landscape.”

 

By Colm Hebblethwaite

Unilever, one of the world’s biggest advertisers, has announced that it is considering pulling its ads from Facebook and Google in a bid to avoid platforms that “create division”.

The consumer goods multinational, which owns brands Lynx, Persil, Ben & Jerry’s and PG Tips, does not want its ads appearing on platforms that promote hate or fail to protect consumers.

Unilever is the world’s second largest marketing spender, behind Proctor and Gamble. Last year the company spent £6.8bn advertising its brands.

Chief marketing officer Keith Weed said in a speech at the annual Interactive Advertising Bureau that “as one of the largest advertisers in the world, we cannot have an environment where our consumers don’t trust what they see online.”

Transparency and responsibility

Weed went on to say that the company did not want to continue to support a digital supply chain which, while responsible for delivering a quarter of the company’s advertising, “is little better than a swamp in terms of transparency”.

He went on to say that the effort to clean up the digital supply chain will resemble the process that Unilever went through when it attempted sustainable sources for its ingredients and raw materials. The company has made cuts to its ad production as part of an effort to cut costs. This involves cutting the number of ad agencies it works with to a humble 1,500.

Craig Tuck, Managing Director, UK, at RhythmOne, said:

“Various social giants have been publicly scrutinised for serving ads against inappropriate content recently and Unilever is another example of a brand reviewing their strategy to ensure they remain trusted. When trust is in question, consumers often revert to their own network – meaning there’s more emphasis on dark social.

“74% of sharing activity takes place across email and instant messaging, so having the tools to analyse this trend properly will be increasingly important. Digital brand safety is an incredibly complex area – and one that we have invested heavily in, as we feel it will be a key area that advertisers look at when allocating their media spend going forward.”

Andrew Morsy, UK Managing Director at Sizmek, said:

“Unilever’s warning to the big tech giants regarding ad spend highlights what is probably the single biggest challenge for our industry – the demand for change when it comes to transparency. This is not the first story we’ve seen about huge advertisers threatening to pull ad budget over concerns around secrecy, fake news and brand safety. Due to their dominance over the advertising market, the ‘duopoly’ has an even greater responsibility to ‘serve and protect’ brands advertising with them, as well as the consumers viewing those adverts. But they’re not the only ones – this is a trust issue that all of us in the ad tech arena need to focus on.

“Fundamentally, as Unilever has shown today, advertisers want transparency when it comes how much they’re spending, to whom that spend is going and where ads are being placed. There is a spotlight on spend and ROI now for many brands and this only comes from empowering agencies and advertisers with increased visibility, control and performance over their media planning and buying.”

By Colm Hebblethwaite

 

Facebook’s newly released figures for Q4 2017 show that revenue came in well above analyst expectations at $12.97 billion. The consensus projection was that sales revenue would come in at $12.6 billion.

Mobile ad revenue accounted for around 89% of the social media giant’s total ad sales for the quarter.

The number of monthly active users rose 14% to 2.13 billion, which was a slightly lower rate of growth than the previous quarter. The company cemented itself as the world’s second largest ad seller after Google.

The figures were, however, not all positive. The time spent by users on the site has fallen by around 5%, or 50 million hours a day. Mark Zuckerberg noted that changes to the news feed, such as reducing the volume of viral videos, were a major factor in the drop.

News feed changes

In a conference call to investors, Zuckerberg was keen to emphasise that time spent on the site was by itself only a limited tool to judge the value of the network. He also said that he expects short term drops due to changes to in the news feed will make the product stronger overall.

Forbes quotes Zuckerberg as saying:

“By focusing on meaningful interactions, I believe that the time spent on Facebook will be more valuable. If people interact more, it should lead to stronger community. When you care about something, you’re willing to see ads to experience it.”

The figures may a concern, however, as they come before the implementation of the year-long major changes that will look to make interactions between users a priority. There have been concerns of the effect these changes will have on the company’s ability to deliver effective ad opportunities for brands.

“Changes to the algorithm shouldn’t make brands and publishers look to spend less on ads, on the contrary Facebook still gives them the biggest potential reach, as well as the best targeting capabilities for the best performance on every dollar spent,” said Socialbakers CEO Yuval Ben-Itzhak.

“To perform on Facebook in 2018, marketers will need to better understand sub-segments of their audience and target them with more personalised content that will drive engagement. Marketers also need to benchmark their ad spend against their own performance and that of their competitors to make sure that they are spending their budget wisely and only on the best performing content.

“While Facebook has made a lot of changes recently that on the surface look like they make it harder for brands and publishers, in fact this is an opportunity. The brands and publishers that produce engaging content, are smart about their use of different post types and benchmarks and measure their ad spend can only come out winning. Facebook’s audience size can’t be discounted and should rightfully remain a priority platform for marketers.”

Internet ads are so invasive that we can’t blame you for thinking that Facebook is listening to you talk. It’s probably not, but it is helping ad networks track you across the internet and across your apps. Tech public policy expert Chris Yiu recently tweeted 14 different ways that ads follow you around the internet, even when you’re logged out, in incognito, using a different browser, or on a new device.

One important one is Facebook’s trackers, which are embedded on any site that integrates Facebook “like” buttons, Facebook page widgets, or other social tools:

You open Google and search for a product or website, which helps Google build up a profile of you and your interests. Later on you use your Google account to sign in somewhere else, and you see ads based on this profile (N.B. you can turn ads personalization off if you want to)

You’re logged in to Facebook. You visit a website and it has Facebook’s tracking pixel (or Like button) installed, which lets Facebook know you’re there. Later on you visit Facebook, and your newsfeed contains adverts based on what you were looking at earlier

Here are a few ways you can minimize unwanted personalization. For example, you can reset your phone’s unique identifier:

You install an app on your phone, and then sign in to it using one of your online accounts. You guessed it: your device ID is now associated with that account. Later on you see ads based on your apps when you’re using the account on your computer

N.B. Apple, Android and Windows mobile devices all let you disable or reset your device ID. This won’t stop you seeing ads, but it will reduce the amount of personalization that can follow you from one app to another

Unfortunately, you can’t control all tracking—Facebook and Google can collect data on you even if you don’t have an account, by scooping up your friends’ phone contacts or by logging usual browser data. This is the kind of invasive tracking and data collection that prompted the European Union to enact GDPR. So all those “we’ve changed our privacy policy” emails are a good sign—or at least a good start.

People go online to search for different types of information and this means that your company needs a strong online presence. Many users need to carry out searches before they make a purchase. Your business thus requires a website that will be ranked on the first page of search results. Websites represent companies and have the ability to determine whether or not users will be receptive to them.

Search Results

Having a website is important but in order for it to help your business become more profitable, it needs to be seen in search results whenever searches are carried out using particular keywords. This is based on the tendency of people to search according to what they are looking for, such as product or service.

Websites that do not appear on the first page of search engine results when people carry out searches can be regarded as non-existent among online users. This is why you need to ensure that your site ranks highly for specific keywords so that search engines place your site higher than several others that are related to the same keywords. SEO includes a variety of factors and plays a critical role in web design.

Value of SEO

Web design and SEO work together and more web designers are choosing to integrate SEO when designing websites. It is important for business owners to be aware of how important SEO is in web design and the value it adds to the design process.

A web design that is compatible with SEO is likely to draw more traffic. A website may be attractive and dazzling but if it is not search-engine friendly, you restrict the ability of major search engines to access your content.

If your website content is not readily accessible to search engines, it will not have a high ranking in the search results. Integrating SEO appropriately in your web design includes aspects such as technology, navigation, linking and content.

Content, Keywords and Links

 

The content on your web pages is vital for SEO success. During the process of building your site, it is advisable for the web designer to be aware of what your business entails. This makes it possible for lists of keywords to be selected in the initial stages of development according to what users are likely to search for when looking for information that relates to the site.
Content is essential in SEO but should be used properly to avoid any unethical practices that may lower our ranking or lead to search engines penalizing your site.Strategic and meaningful placement of keywords will help you get a better ranking for your web pages in search results.

Adding keywords to content while creating the web pages will help to cut down on the time used to change content on web pages for the purpose of SEO.
Link building enables you to have links directed from other credible sites to help you achieve better search engine rankings for your website. In order for quality content and proper link building to yield the best results, web design needs to cater for SEO.

SEO is as critical as the design concepts for your website. If the site is designed while incorporating SEO, the web pages will soon start ranking higher and attracting more users through search engines. Find out how you can analyze a web design company through its portfolio here.

Search Engine Friendly Sites

 

Search engine optimization constitutes a range of things including content, keywords, and title tags. If you are not sure of how to implement SEO, you can consult a professional web design service that will help you create an SEO compliant site.

Search engines require relevant and original content along with suitable visual elements such as videos and images. Search engines invest a lot in bandwidth and sites that are easy to crawl through require fewer resources.

Web designers create SEO compliant sites that can be crawled faster and easier by search engines. Technology and navigation are among the factors that are considered in search engine optimization. The objective of search engines is to enhance the usability of the web.

Make sure that SEO is incorporated into your web design process right from the start. After spending a considerable amount of time, money and effort in creating your site, you need to ensure that as many as people as possible will be able to access it.

Visual Appeal and Ranking

Good web designers are aware of the importance of creating attractive sites with SEO in mind. SEO enables you to get better ranking for your site on the web. When users search for products that are available on your website, they will be able to see it as soon as they type in the keywords.

A higher ranking for your website will increase the possibility of your site getting more clicks. It is important for you to drive more traffic to your website because the people who visit your site may become your customers.

Overall Design

The design of your home page is important because it is the first impression of your website and business that your visitors get. Good web design should leave a lasting and positive impression. It is always a good idea to have a clean and clutter-free home page that will not cause your visitors to leave as soon as they log on.

Consider other aspects such as the sizes of your images, navigation, user and search engine friendliness, colors, and overall design. Responsive design is a popular concept because it involves designing for various devices. With the ongoing advancements in technology and increase in online visitors, SEO practices continue to evolve.

Conclusion

Web designers now have access to more technology and options than they did and this is evident in how advanced web designing has become. When you design a website, the user should always be a priority because this helps to determine SEO rankings. This is based on various technicalities and makes it necessary to always prioritize the end user during the design process.

Web design is beneficial for businesses, customers, and search engines when it is not complex or overwhelming. It should lead to links and content that users need while giving businesses the opportunity to reach more people.

A responsive website is not enough to survive in the mobile-first indexing era, says contributor Barry Adams. Here’s a list of technical SEO and general optimization aspects you need to be aware of and fix on your site if necessary.

It’s taken over a year and a half, but Google’s mobile-first indexing is finally here.

The Search Console messages have begun to appear, and sites are steadily being switched over to the mobile-first indexing approach.

A lot has been written about mobile-first indexing, but most of the attention has focused on the basic aspects of mobile search engine optimization. In this article, I want to dig into some of the more technical aspects of mobile search engine optimization (SEO) and show what you can do to ensure your website is fully ready and will survive the mobile-first indexing era.

Mobile-first indexing

What does Google mean by “mobile-first indexing?”Contrary to what some SEOs believe, Google is not creating a separate index for mobile search. Whether a site is part of the mobile-first indexing approach or not, Google still serves its search results from the same index of the web.

At its core, only one thing really changes: Instead of crawling websites with a desktop user-agent, Google will crawl websites with a mobile user-agent.

Historically, Google has crawled websites from a desktop perspective, with a user-agent string that indicates a desktop device:

Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +https://www.google.com/bot.html)

With mobile-first indexing, this changes to a user-agent indicating a mobile device:

Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 6.0.1; Nexus 5X Build/MMB29P) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/41.0.2272.96 Mobile Safari/537.36 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +https://www.google.com/bot.html)

This user-agent string shows that it’s purporting to be an Android device, so it expects to see your website’s content optimized for mobile viewing on that type of device.

Delivering mobile-optimized experiences

With this mobile user-agent, what Googlebot sees depends on how your website is configured to handle mobile users. Delivering mobile-optimized experiences tends to happen in one of three ways:

• Responsive design. With this approach, nothing really changes. Your website’s uniform resource locators (URLs) remain the same, and the HyperText Markup Language (HTML) code served is identical as well. The site’s design will adapt to the size of the screen it’s being shown on, delivering a mobile experience catered to the device’s specific screen resolution. Google recommends responsive design as its preferred design pattern, as it requires the least effort from their end; there is no extra code to index and no additional URLs to crawl.
• Dynamic serving. Sometimes websites will detect the user-agent when a page is being loaded and serve different HTML code on the same URL depending on the type of device that’s being used. This is called dynamic serving. It is the same URL, different HTML code, one for desktop users and another for mobile users.
• Separate mobile URL. In this approach, a website will serve different code to mobile users as well and will also use different URLs for its mobile site. Often a website will serve its mobile content from a separate subdomain, like m.website.com, or from a different subfolder like www.website.com/mobile/.
  Each of these mobile design approaches has its own strengths and weaknesses. For the purpose of SEO, responsive design tends to present the least hassle, whereas dynamic serving and separate mobile URLs can cause a lot of problems with your site’s SEO.

But having a fully responsive site doesn’t mean your work is done. Even if you have a responsive site and get a green mark on Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test, that doesn’t mean you don’t have anything to fear from mobile-first indexing.

There are still some aspects of technical SEO and general optimization you need to be aware of and, if necessary, fix on your site. And if your site relies on dynamic serving or separate mobile URLs, there might be quite a lot of work to be done to ensure your site continues to perform.

On-page SEO

First of all, you will need to check your on-page SEO is in order on your mobile site. For websites using responsive design, this is not really an issue, as mobile and desktop pages are basically the same.

However, if your site uses dynamic serving or separate mobile URLs, it’s important to double-check your on-page SEO:

Do you have optimized title tags and meta descriptions?
Do your pages have strong headlines?
Is your content the same as on your desktop versions?
This first step is crucial. Once your site is switched to mobile-first indexing, Google will use what it sees on your mobile site for indexing and ranking. If your mobile site doesn’t have the same level of on-page SEO as your desktop site, you can expect to see your site suffer as a result.

Structured data

In addition to the basic on-page SEO elements, you will also need to keep structured data in mind. Your site may have structured data embedded on your desktop pages that can drive rich snippets in Google’s search results pages. If this structured data is absent on your mobile site, you could lose those rich snippets and the click-through rate (CTR) benefits they convey.

Make sure any structured data markup that’s present on your desktop site is also present — and fully valid — on your mobile site. Use Google’s structured data testing tool to verify your markup, and keep an eye on the structured data report in Google Search Console for potential errors and warnings.

Hreflang tags

If you have an international website, you may be using hreflang tags to indicate alternate versions of your content for different countries and languages. If this is the case, you may need to update your hreflang tags on the mobile version of your site.

Google has indicated that it expects to see appropriate hreflang references on your desktop and mobile websites. So if you have a website that uses separate mobile URLs, make sure your hreflang tags on mobile point to the mobile versions of your international content:

Pagination

Sometimes, for the sake of a smooth mobile user experience, websites will not paginate content the same way for mobile users as it does for desktop users. Instead of links to deeper pages, your mobile site may use infinite scrolling for mobile users or do without any pagination at all and just show a limited set of content.

If this is the case, you will need to fix this before your site is switched to mobile-first indexing. A lack of pagination, or the wrong implementation, could mean that Googlebot won’t see beyond the first page of paginated content. If Googlebot can’t see it, it can’t be crawled and could eventually drop out of Google’s index entirely.

So make sure your pagination is properly handled on mobile, with fully crawlable pagination URLs.

Additionally, your site may use pagination meta tags to indicate paginated content. With rel=prev and rel=next, you can signpost paginated content, like lists of products or an article spread out over multiple pages.

When you use dynamic serving or separate mobile URLs, you need to make sure your pagination meta tags are in place on mobile as well as on desktop.

Internal link structure

When Googlebot crawls a website, it basically just looks for links to follow and crawl. Links are how people navigate the web, and it’s also how search engines crawl the web.

We know links are crucial for ranking purposes. Google still uses PageRank to help evaluate web pages for ranking and links are how PageRank flows through the web.

This won’t change with mobile-first indexing. Links will still be immensely important, and that means you need to look at your mobile site’s internal link structure in the same way as on a desktop.

Often mobile versions of a site will show fewer links to manage their users’ experience more tightly. Mobile devices have smaller screens and use a different interaction model (touch screen vs. mouse and keyboard), so there’s less room for links to deeper pages. The downside is that it could impact your site’s mobile SEO.

Because links are crucial for Google, fewer links on your mobile site means a different distribution of PageRank through your site. This could mean some of your deeper pages lose ranking power once your site is switched to mobile-first indexing.

A good way to check your site’s internal link structure on desktop and mobile is to use a tool like Sitebulb to crawl your site.

Configure Sitebulb to crawl your site with a desktop user-agent, and then crawl your site again with a mobile user-agent. Then, compare crawl maps for both versions and see how they differ.

 

Alternatively, you can use a cloud crawler like DeepCrawl to do the same.

 

 

Rather than a visual crawl map, DeepCrawl uses an internal link metric called DeepRank to indicate the internal link value for each URL on your site. By comparing the DeepRank scores for your desktop and mobile URLs, you can see how the flow of link value on your mobile site differs from your desktop site.

You may discover that some deeper pages get much less link value on mobile, and you’ll need to address this with improved internal linking.

Reasonable surfer approach

An additional aspect of internal linking is the value of each link, as determined by its place within your content.

In 2004, Google filed a patent describing a “reasonable surfer” approach to evaluating the weight a link should carry. In a nutshell, if a link is likely to be clicked on by a regular user (the “reasonable surfer”), that link should carry more weight than a link that is not likely to be clicked on.

So the position of a link in your content matters a lot. Links that are not likely to be clicked, such as footer links, will have less value than links that users are likely to click on, such as links in the main body content.

There’s no reason to believe Google will stop applying this logic in mobile-first indexing. And this could have a profound impact on your website’s internal link value, especially if your site uses mobile user experience (UX) tricks such as collapsed content and hidden divs.

Make sure you evaluate not just the presence of internal links, but also where those links exist on your mobile site. Are they prominent and very clickable, or hidden and unlikely to be clicked by a mobile user? If the latter is the case, expect those links to carry less weight than they might on a desktop.

Site configuration

Lastly, there are some aspects of your site’s technical configuration that can impact your organic performance in mobile-first indexing. These areas of your site are often neglected on mobile because they apply primarily to search engines and have little to no impact on users.

It pays to double-check each of these aspects on your mobile sites to ensure you offer a complete experience to search engines as well.

Robots.txt

Your site’s robots.txt file contains directives for search engines to adhere to when they crawl your site. If you have a separate mobile site that lives on a different subdomain, like m.website.com, you could have a different robots.txt file for that mobile site — or worse, have no robots.txt file at all.

Make sure that your mobile site has the same robots.txt rules as your desktop site, serving the same purpose. So if you are using disallow rules in robots.txt to prevent your site’s internal search function from being crawled on your desktop site, you need to do the same on your mobile site.

Redirects

Often a site will have many redirects in place to send users, and search engines, to the correct pages when content is changed or replaced. Your redirects may be optimally tuned on your desktop site, but are they also in place on your mobile site?

A lack of proper redirects on your mobile site could cause all kinds of SEO problems, so make sure your redirects are in place for mobile users as well.

Crawl rate

When your site is switched over to mobile-first indexing, there is a chance Google will increase the rate at which it crawls your site to ensure it’s finding all your mobile pages. Your site needs to be able to handle this properly without slowing your site down.

Making sure your site’s hosting environment has enough capacity to handle an increased crawl rate isn’t just for SEO; it could also speed up your site in general, which has all kinds of additional benefits.

Double-check everything, then check again

Mobile first indexing is a matter of when, not if. It will happen to your site sooner or later, and you need to be ready for it.

Preparing for the mobile-first indexing era means you need to check everything, and then check it again. Don’t be complacent; a positive Mobile-Friendly Test is just the beginning. Make sure every aspect of your site’s SEO is in order on mobile as well as a desktop, and your switch should be easy and hassle-free.