John Mueller’s Response to Choosing Between Desktop or Mobile Site

On a recent Google Webmasters Hangouts session, John Mueller stated that site owners should prioritize their mobile site over the desktop version if they have both.

This topic was addressed as a question by an e-commerce site owner being skeptical about whether they should focus on improving the mobile or desktop version of their site due to budget restrictions and having an efficient approach to enhance the search rankings.

So the simple question is, on which version of the site should the owner work?

Hear the answer to the question in the video below at 25:15 (Timestamp):

John Mueller’s Response:

Due to Google’s mobile-first indexing, the mobile version is only relevant when it comes to search rankings and SEO. So considering if the site has been moved to mobile-first indexing, Google is no longer crawling the desktop version of that site.

Mueller further finally answers that the emphasis should be on the mobile version by the site owner. However, not to remove the desktop version as some of the customers might use that to access the site.

Further, John insists to make the site more responsive in terms of the design and the content and if SEO is the number one priority, then you have to focus on the mobile version.