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Jan 14, 2017

Is Your Law Firm Ready for Google’s New Mobile Index?

A separate mobile index. That’s what Google has been saying it plans on rolling out (or more than likely, already has).

I didn’t really understand what that meant when I first heard it. With regard to links and content, the mobile version of our site is the same as the desktop.

Especially since our site is responsive and not a separate site shown only to people on a mobile device.

Both have the same URLs, the same content, the same internal page structure, the same internal links, and (usually) the same navigation.

So what difference does it make if Google has one index for mobile webpages and another for desktop pages?

Especially if the only difference between the pages in each index is the way they appear to visitors based on the device that they’re using to view it.

And that right there is the difference that matters: user activity.

We’ve known that user activity and people finding what they’re looking for on your site has been a ranking factor increasing in weight over the past few years.

Google measures this according to metrics such as time on site, bounce rate, and pages visited, just to name a few.

Up until now, Google ranked your site based on how people used your law firm website on a desktop computer.

That is what will be changing this year.

Google is flipping the type of device-use measured so that your site will now rank according to how people use it on a mobile device—not a desktop.

That’s HUGE!

How many law firm websites do you know of that were built with the mobile user as the primary focus?

Right . . . not many at all.

Every other huge company (think of Facebook and their most recent acquisitions) is putting mobile first. It’s about time that Google did, too.

How are you serving mobile users?

What’s on your mind? Tell us below.

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