Google's New Mobile-First Index and the Death of Desktop SEO

Google just started rolling out the so-called “mobile-first” index. It’s going to change the way that your site gets ranked in the search engine results pages (SERPs). Here are a things you need to know about the mobile-first index so that you can optimize your website accordingly.

What is the mobile-first index?

By now, you probably know that Google crawls your site to add pages to its index. That is, it uses a bot to surf around your site like a real visitor and follows links on your pages.

In the past, Google crawled your site as a desktop user. Now, however, Google will crawl your site as a mobile user. That’s a distinction with a really big difference.

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Google is changing the way it thinks about keywords. Search is no longer about the phrase you type into a box; it’s about creating a natural conversation with the user. Google is doing that by modifying the search query based on the entire “conversation,” and most importantly, it is doing that across all your devices.

This will change the way we engage with search forever, because once search is about conversations vs. questions, you can no longer buy keywords; instead, you have to “buy” your part in the conversation.

Fast forward to today. When Siri and similar services first emerged, I was reminded of those seamless human-to-computer interactions that were fun, conversational and hyper-relevant. It seems that in terms of search, we are heading toward a voyage on the Starship Enterprise.

The Demise Of Keywords?

So what does this have to do with the death of my beloved keywords? Why is natural vocal interaction with computers making me think about their demise?

Here is why: I recently attended a meeting between some of our search leads and Google, and a highlight of that event was the presentation by one of the Google engineers (those mythical creatures that were molded from clay and spend their days experimenting on secret projects).

To my surprise, he told us that most of his fellow engineers that work on Google’s search product actually do not like the search box; they believe that it offers a sub-par user experience, and they are constantly trying to create a more natural interaction between Google and its users.