You can't simply make your site responsive and truly call it mobile-ready, argues contributor Jim Yu. To really adjust to the dramatic rise of mobile search, you need to understand how people are using these devices for finding things.
Smartphones and tablets have completely disrupted and forever altered what was once a fairly linear buyer’s journey. These days, a consumer might drop into your funnel at any point, from any channel, and it might be after an unknown number of touch points across platforms and devices that you didn’t see happening.
They’re reading reviews, are exposed to organic and paid social, are searching for nearby answers for their immediate needs and more. Increasingly, consumers are doing all of these things from a mobile device.
Recent research at BrightEdge (my company) shows that 57 percent of all online traffic now comes from mobile and tablet. Pair this consumer insight with the knowledge that Google’s mobile-first algorithm is coming, and we marketers have some work to do.
In this column, I’ll share the results of our recent Google SERPs Mobile vs. Desktop research, and you’ll learn how to Google-proof your SEO and content marketing strategies to prepare for what’s next.
Why mobile matters
As the shift to mobile has picked up speed, we’ve discovered some new ways to determine what that actually means in terms of real, measurable impact on businesses.
One such insight gleaned from our recent research helps us assess the extent to which mobile matters to Google. We’ve been tracking Google’s experimentation with the mobile-first index since it was announced in 2016, and what we learned might surprise you.
We tracked SERP listing data for nearly 25 million keywords, and what we discovered is that 79 percent of listings have a different rank on mobile and desktop devices. For listings in positions 1-20, 47 percent had mobile and desktop rankings that were not the same.
Furthermore, we found that 35 percent of the time, the top-ranking URL of a domain for a given query is different on desktop than on mobile.
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Original Article http://searchengineland.com/mobile-desktop-seo-different-results-different-content-strategies-281643
Original article by Jim Yu on http://searchengineland.com