The key to solving this problem is to learn how to track the progress of local searches to your site and your business. This setup can help you get what you need to show people that local (and mobile) is essential for your business. Or, if you're in the right company, you might be able to call the legal department. Your industry may have accessibility requirements and a solid mobile experience may just be something you need to do. Finally, you still have to pick your battles and “choose which hill to die on.”
Be sure to make steady progress over time; the path to maximum mobile friendliness is definitely a marathon, not a sprint. See Ashley Berman Hale's full presentation here: IRL Mobile Friendly: Beyond Best Practices by Ashely Berman Hale of Search jewelry retouching service Marketing Expo - SMX Gary Illyes: Google's point of view Illyes explains that, traditionally, the Google index is based on crawling desktop content. However, the problem Google faces is that on many sites, the desktop site would have more content on its pages than the corresponding
mobile pages. This caused search issues because Google returned pages to mobile users based on the content they found on desktop pages, but then users received the mobile page and the content was not there. This created frustration with the quality of Google's results, and eventually led to the idea of moving to a mobile-first index. This means that Google will crawl mobile sites and base its search index on the content it finds from that crawl. Illyes' message on this is: "Don't panic." Google is approaching this very carefully, and they don't yet know when a full mobile index will go live.