Last year, research revealed mobile devices now account for 57 percent of all traffic, so it stands to reason that Google should use a mobile user agent to crawl and index content.

Google’s aim is to launch this index worldwide, in a move that will see the search giant access the mobile version of a website to index and rank content. Even if a consumer searches on a desktop device, Google will query its index of mobile content to find the most authoritative, relevant response. The mobile version of your site will become the primary version once the index switches over.

There has been a lot of speculation about this seismic shift since the initial announcement, but we are past the point of conjecture now. Search marketers need to be at their most vigilant to ensure their sites are optimized for mobile and in prime position to benefit from this development.