Organic Search Trends: Desktop vs Mobile

Last night, I stumbled upon this article by Jennifer Slegg, and I got to thinking about the ways people are discovering my clients’ sites using organic search. I spend quite a bit of time looking at various dimensions in Google Analytics – device types, browsers, operating systems, etc… But from a high-level view, I keep track of organic search in terms of ‘Desktop Visits’ and ‘Mobile Visits’. In the past year, these two buckets have been changing drastically. One is filling up. The other is emptying out.

Here is one type of graph that shows the growth in Mobile Visits as a percentage of overall organic search visits:

The Growth of Mobile Visits as a % of Overall SEO Visits

Clearly, organic visits from mobile devices is growing at a steady pace. On the other side of the coin, we are seeing that Desktop Visits are representing a smaller piece of the pie. Because of these trends, we can then make a solid case that YOU SHOULD BE TRACKING YOUR MOBILE RANKINGS.

If your desktop rankings are growing, that’s awesome. But in 2015, you can’t solely lean on that KPI as a the only indicator of success. It’s only half the story. You have to also keep a keen eye on your mobile rankings, specifically in Google. By keeping track of both, you will have a much better understanding of your site’s position in the SERPs.

Is Your Mobile Website “Mobile Friendly”?

Now that we have determined that it is critical to get your site ranking in mobile search, it’s time to talk about “mobile friendly” websites. Lucky for us, Google just released this super rad Mobile-Friendly Test Tool:

Google Mobile-Friendly Testing Tool

Go ahead. Give it a try. All you have to do is paste a URL in the box and click ‘Analyze’.

Here are two examples. The first one is for this URL that turns out to be a mobile friendly success story:

BestBuy.com: Mobile-Friendly Site Test

The next example is from a Telescope.com URL that is, sadly, not mobile-friendly:

Telescope.com Mobile-Friendly Test

The good news is that Google does give you some feedback and some pointers.

So get out there and test your mobile sites.

Cheers!