By Minal BopaiahIn May, The Financial Times launched a new subscription product called fastFT, available to subscribers and registered users. But unlike most subscription content sites, FT decided to focus on going mobile first instead of optimizing for search.The new product provides breaking market-moving financial and political stories 24 hours a day, and FT was wise to focus on mobile since that’s the sort of news consumers want to digest on their phones. More importantly, new data shows that one in five UK news readers access content exclusively on mobile.But in deciding to go mobile first and publishing content in the way they wanted to optimize mobile usage for premium users, FT basically had to forego indexing their content in the most optimal way for Google. FT.com’s Managing Director Rob Grimshaw told the Garrett Goodman, who wrote in The Huffington Post, that fastFT’s new CMS streamlines the writing and editing process down to a single screen, thus eliminating the requirement of proofing by editors on other machines, which also lets FT publish breaking news faster. All good things, in my opinion.But the question remains, should you be investing your resources in a similar manner?That depends on how much leverage your brand already has. FT.com famously created an HTML5 mobile app so that it could avoid Apple’s rigid native environment and keep the 30% of revenues Apple usually takes.But FT also has the advantage of tremendous brand recognition, and an established subscriber base that’s willing to pay for digital access. Other publications that are struggling to get brand recognition should opt for SEO-indexing over a mobile first strategy.That said, fastFT is a great product on two fronts — one, it’s a new subscription product that meets consumers where they are. (I am SO over newspaper editors promoting and bemoaning the myth that the masses are not interested in news. They are. But no one has an hour after work to read the paper anymore, and no company should expect consumers to rearrange their lives in order to engage with its product.)Two, fastFT is a great retention tactic for existing subscribers since it reinforces the idea that FT.com can deliver the news subscribers want at the time they want it.So, big legacy publications with brand recognition would be wise to take a page from FT’s playbook. Smaller operations should still optimize for SEO before building the word of mouth they need to go digital first.