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Desktop vs Mobile – Loss of Visibility

Deviations in dominant positions
How many domains change their positions in mobile search?
The table below shows how many domains manage to maintain their position.

As we found, only 13% of websites have the same position on all devices.

Digging deeper, we counted how many domains shift between one, three and ten positions on mobile compared to their desktop position.

Changing a position may not seem like a big deal, but keep in mind that desktop and mobile results are different because it changes scroll depth and click rate.

Compared to desktop, dropping out of the top 3 on mobile bulgaria phone number list impacts your traffic more drastically.

Desktop vs Domain - Changing Domain Positions



The data obtained from this SEMrush study shows that the transition towards a mobile-first index is advancing rapidly, although it is probably not yet fully completed, either by Google or by many websites.

If more than 30% of the results that appear on the first page of Google for desktop searches are not maintained in the results from mobile devices, it is probably because there is still a similar percentage of websites that have not been adapted to these types of devices.

In this scenario, websites with similar content that have already done so, win the game and “sneak” into the first mobile results.

On the other hand, we found that only 10% of the results maintain their position.

The cause must be sought among multiple factors.

Geolocation probably has an important value in mobile searches that it does not have in desktop searches.

This means that local results have a higher chance of appearing in mobile searches, while proximity does not weigh as heavily in relevance for desktop searches.

In addition to geolocation, the influence of personalized results, the acceptance of suggested searches to avoid continuing to type, the way of approaching searches –different when you have or do not have a physical keyboard– or even voice searches, all of this influences the order of results that may be different on mobile phones or desktop computers.

There is a curious fact and that is that the number of domains that maintain their positions is higher than the number of URLs.

This could be due to domains that have adopted mobile-specific versions on subdomains of the type m.”.

In these cases, it is possible that Google was showing different URLs in desktop and mobile searches, although in both cases they belonged to the same domain (albeit, different subdomains).