There’s been a lot of growth in mobile, as you most likely have heard and may have noticed. We’ve been talking about mobile a lot recently and we wanted to elaborate on the significance of ranking on mobile. There are a lot of statistics that are out about mobile, so Adam and Chad wanted to familiarize you with a new study that was conducted by seoClarity, which outlines the importance of mobile. In this Daily Brown Bag, you’ll learn about the importance of ranking on mobile, how the click through rate for the number one spot in mobile compares to the click through rate for the number one spot in desktop, and more information on mobile that you’ll want to know!
Also available on YouTube.
TRANSCRIPTION:
Hello, and welcome to the daily Brown Bag. Today, we're going to talk about the importance of ranking on mobile. I'm Chad Hill and I'm joined by Adam Stetzer.
Good afternoon, Chad. Welcome to the Brown Bag. Yeah, we've been talking about mobile a lot. There's a lot of stats out about mobile, showing just how important mobile is and the growing importance. We're going to talk about social, too. Similar trends there, yet there's still a lot of interest in desktops, so what's some of the data we're talking about today, Chad? Here is a new study from seoClarity, talking about just how important it is to have high rankings, which we already know in the desktop world, but particularly for the mobile world, and let me break this data down for you so you can understand what we're seeing with mobile. They conducted a very large study on mobile and they analyzed more than two billion impressions, quite a few clicks, for a period of over 90 days and, what they saw, Chad, is that the click through rate for the number one spot in mobile gets three times as many clicks as the number one spot in desktop on a relative basis.
So, let me break that down for you. So, if you look at mobile, the click through rates are 28% for the top ranking, 9% for the second, and 4% for the third, so it drops off very dramatically from that first position in the rankings, organic rankings to the second to the third versus desktop. We've always talked about how it drops off, but it drops off more gradually for desktop users than mobile users, again, looking at organic search to the click through rate. For the top ranked spot is 19%, which is a good 10 points lower than it is for mobile. That 19 drops to 11 for position number two and 8% for the third position. So, what can we make from all this data?
Well, it certainly is a winner take all type of moment here, because I think that if more traffic is moving to mobile and you're basically showing here that that number one ranking is critical, it really is tough for a lot of businesses because, as we know, a lot of people come to us and want to be in position one, but it's a very difficult to knock the guy above you off the page, but here we are on a device, mobile device, that has less screen space.
So, I think we do know a lot about mobile, that people are spending more of their time there, we know how important it is, we know, for example, from a Brown Bag the other day, we know that 80% of local searches that happen on mobile devices lead to purchases. People are looking for things like addresses, hours, directions and that 55% of consumers using mobile research want to buy within an hour, certainly, and then 83% within a day. So, I think, Adam, this is one of those, it's really good information, something that we need to start baking into how we talk about your mobile strategy, but I do think it's a pretty high bar to be setting, so that small businesses are needing to get position one in order to get that click through rate that we're talking about here.
Yeah, it's pretty startling really, seeing it's that much more important to be number one, on mobile, which is where all the growth is, and yet we're hearing the same week that Google's got Penguin 3.0, saying to be number one, you've really got to follow the rules and those rules are very vague and it's hard to know exactly what you can do, so this data suggests be very aggressive to get to number one. Of course, Google Penguin 3.0 suggests don't be aggressive in the wrong way. So, I think all roads lead back to real SEO and probably, more importantly, doing it the right way so you stay up in position one.
Well, that's our coverage of this new mobile data from this seoClarity study. We'd like to hear your thoughts. Drop us a comment. Better yet, subscribe. We'll see you tomorrow.
