When Google released its article "Toward the Mobile-First Index" on November 5, 2016, not only we website production companies but most people interested in online marketing must have thought, "So it's finally here!"

About six months have passed since then... and it still hasn't been officially rolled out.
Recent news articles say it will take several more months, or that full implementation may not come until 2018 or later.

Why is implementation being delayed? Let me offer my own thoughts.

What exactly is the mobile-first index? Let's go over it again

* Google reads (indexes) websites around the world and evaluates the content of each page.
* Based on those evaluations, it ranks and serves the most appropriate web pages when users search.
* Meanwhile, these days users search not only on PCs but on mobile devices such as smartphones. In fact, you could say mobile is now the center of it all.
* On the other hand, many existing websites are still built for PC users, and the reality is that some are hard to view on mobile.
* So wouldn't it be better to rank sites optimized for mobile — where most users (and most demand) are — higher in search results?
* And rather than viewing (indexing) pages from a PC perspective as we do now, shouldn't we view them from a smartphone perspective instead?

Roughly speaking, that's the gist of it.

In other words, to put it in a single sentence:
"Website owners of the world, beef up your mobile sites (where the search demand is)!!"
Just think of it as the message the almighty Google is sending, and you'll have it right.

Is the mobile-first index difficult even for the mighty Google?

It's true that the internet is now used mainly on smartphones.
So you might think, why not just get on with it? But this change must be extremely difficult even for Google.
After all, in the roughly 20-plus years since websites began spreading across the internet, there were only PC-oriented sites for most of that time.
Continuing to deliver good search results to existing PC users while also providing better information to the ever-growing number of mobile users is apparently not as easy as it sounds.

There are many possible reasons, but one is that search phrases fall into those "in high demand among PC users" and those "in high demand among mobile users."
Let me give a concrete example.
We're a website production company, and our target users are company executives and owners, PR managers, and so on. In other words, B2B — business users.
When we analyze the users who visit our site, which is mainly a B2B business,
the split is "PC : mobile = 6 : 4," so PC users are in the majority. (Though I do feel mobile has grown compared with a few years ago.)
Put in terms of search phrases, the ones that bring people to our site — "website production company," "web production company," and the like — could be called PC-oriented search phrases.

On the other hand, what about a beauty salon or a restaurant?
Needless to say, most of the users who visit their websites are smartphone users.
Looking at the analytics for our clients, roughly 70–80% are mobile users, which shows the difference clearly.
In other words, search phrases aimed at individual consumers — such as "Hamamatsu izakaya," "Iwata Italian," "Fukuroi nail salon," or "Hamamatsu beauty salon" — can be called mobile-oriented search phrases.

Google wants to provide the best possible information to every searcher.
So it wouldn't be surprising if they concluded that simply switching everything over to mobile-first isn't enough.
But how do you draw the line? And what do you do with search phrases where PC and mobile demand are about equal? Just thinking about it makes my head spin (^^;)

Either way, though, there's no doubt that demand from mobile users will keep growing.
If you want to keep increasing the customers you attract online, there's no question that you need to move forward with mobile support.