Google announces mobile first indexing for the whole web, is your real estate website ready?

Most real estate searches today starts on mobile, so it makes sense to have a mobile optimised website for your visitors. So much so that in 2016 Google started including mobile friendliness as a ranking factor and also started advising of upcoming changes on how it crawls and indexes websites.

Now Google has just made a big announcement: it's going to default to mobile 1st indexing for the entire web: https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2020/03/announcing-mobile-first-indexing-for.html

In their announcement, Google again clearly highlights their recommendation for running a responsive website:

"...While we continue to support various ways of making mobile websites, we recommend responsive web design for new websites. We suggest not using separate mobile URLs (often called "m-dot") because of issues and confusion we've seen over the years, both from search engines and users...."

How to check if your real estate website is responsive




What is a responsive website? It's simply one website that can adapt to any screen size device, including mobile, eliminating the need for a separate mobile website. If your website can do the above when resizing your browser, it is responsive. If it fails to resize and adapt your content or displays some message about rotating your device, it is not responsive. 


At Entegral we've launched our responsive real estate website platform, called Flex, back in 2014 and moved away from the older separate mobile and desktop architecture as we clearly saw the benefits, including the move of consumers from desktop to mobile and SEO benefits. We realised that new real estate websites need to be designed from the ground up for mobile but at the same time, be able to adapt to any screen size device, thus our responsive real estate platform, Flex was born.

Make no mistake, responsive design requires a lot more work but over the past 6 years we've fined tuned our platform, assembled a great team and even released a version 2 of the platform in 2018 that takes responsive design to the next level. Industry 1st features includes begin completely serverless (no downtime since launch) and the ability for agents to customise every part of their website.


Check out Flex here: https://www.entegral.net/flex/
Flex runs on Base (also responsive) and even from external listing feeds through Sync.

If you are still running separate mobile and desktop sites, we have a special offer for you, enquire with our team at support@entegral.net 









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