Is there still any value in tracking keyword rankings for desktop?
-
Seeing as everything is graduating towards mobile first, is there any value in tracking desktop and smartphone keywords separately?
-
Hey Unique Digital,
It's a good question, and I hear what you're saying. If Google is crawling everything as a mobile crawler only, desktop rankings should basically be the same, right?
It might get there eventually, but I can say that it's definitely not there now. For one, Google is crawling mobile first, but it's also keeping an eye on desktop versions of sites. At the very least, I'm pretty sure Google is separating mobile and desktop UX metrics.
Also, on queries for my company's site (international money transfers), I can tell you that 1) Google does not show the same rankings between desktop and mobile. Mobile has more answer boxes, and I've noticed that if a site has an answer box, they're less likely to also have the #1 organic result.
So, at least for now, yes, you should track both.
Best,
Kristina
-
This depends entirely upon the site in question and what industry it falls into, as well as the target audience
The general rule is that for B2C mobile optimisations and tracking are superior as many transactions now happen on mobile. But in a B2B environment, particularly targeting office workers, most of them still use desktop terminals as their work-horses, and most of them make business transactions from a desktop machine
These general rules have exceptions, one big example is construction industry B2B. Although B2B is still predominantly desktop, if you are targeting workers, managers and supervisors on a construction site, much of their business decisions are made on mobile devices which bucks the trend
Think of your audience, who they are, and what device they will be in front of as / before / during their transaction
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Potential Keyword Cannibalisation
Hi, I am concerned that our website's rankings are currently being affected by KW cannibalisation. We don't rank too badly for our target keywords but they could, of course, be better, especially as the niche is very competitive! One thing that is bothering me is that our internal pages do not rank well for these KWs and instead it is the homepage appearing in the rankings. This is despite the fact that the internal pages are optimised for the different keywords. Basically the HP is also targeting these same keywords and I was wondering if this is affecting our rankings overall? I am not keen to risk changing the homepage in case our rankings suffer massively and we drop out of Google completely. If anyone could offer some advice then that would be great. Is it simply a case of trying to get external links pointing to these internal pages? Would internal linking to them prove effective as well? Cheers Tom
Keyword Research | | National-Homebuyers1 -
Domain Change, Lost ranking on 1 keyword
Hey guys, Long time follower of the Q&A forum, but don't post too often. I'm having an issue I never came across. We changed a domain from mpbuilderscincy.com to mpcincinnati.com. We did the 301 redirect and all the SEO flowed through pretty well. Most pages didn't even change in file structure so we didn't need to do page redirects for the most part. Anyway, long story short, we are seeing the same rankings as we had before now (it's been about 2 months) except for 1 and only 1 keyword. It's "Home Remodeling Cincinnati". We dropped from page 2, to page 11 on Google and it won't budge. Now on Yahoo and Bing, we are right back where we were before already with that keyword. But Google just refuses to bump us back to where we were before the change. The Home Remodeling page: http://www.mpcincinnati.com/Residential-Services/Home-Remodeling.aspx has an on page grade of A for that keyword and we have it as one of our main keywords on the home page of the site (title, h1, alt tags, etc). No errors on the page. I mean it looks pretty clean for this page as far as SEO except for 1 notice that mentions the 301 canonical redirect. We uploaded the new sitemap right away. I just can't put a thumb on it and wondering if you guys had any tips. Thanks, Chris
Keyword Research | | Cincinnati_WebTec0 -
Is the Adwords keywords planner accurate ?
Hey guyz,
Keyword Research | | atakala
As you guyz do, I base all my seo effort into the keywords' traffic and quality which I can get from Adwords Keywords Planner.
But this post has confused my mind .
It' says the average searches doesn't exactly the average searches.
And everything is okay here now I can say that of course it's not %100 accurate.
But the shocking part is he gives an example of how a big gap there is between real searches number and adwords keywords planner tools give us . What do you think guyz?
Can it be true ?
(And also last time I asked a question, Randy has replied me, If possible please Randy do it again :D.)
Best wishes.0 -
Future of SERP tracking
Hi all I guess we all know what happend to Raven, loosing its AdWords API and being forced into removing SERP tracking. If not, see more here: http://raventools.com/blog/scraped-data-serp-tracker/ What is SEOMOZ stand on this? Will you continue to provide SERP tracking? Kind regards Fredrik
Keyword Research | | Resultify0 -
Rankings not working
It appears that my search rankings in my SEOMoz profile aren't working - either that or something really bad has happened to my rankings. I left it a few days thinking it was updating but nothing seems to have changed. Can anyone help?
Keyword Research | | rachelbuck0 -
Newbie question about keyword difficulty tool
Hi guys, It's my first day here ate seomoz and I got intrigued about the results from the keyword difficulty tool. Even though I do understand the results, I noticed the ranking analysis table has some highlighted cells and some of them have a dark checkmark sign inside. What exactly do they mean? I couldn't find it anywhere. Cheers from Brazil. i0tzl.png
Keyword Research | | lenineto0 -
Keyword Research (dash or no dash)
I have a client that has been optimizing for "print and apply" for the past 5 months. Yesterday they decided it was more grammatically correct to use "print-and-apply." There question to me was "is this going to effect our SEO?" So... I checked the difficulty using the keyword analysis tool, both keywords had the same broad/exact adwords traffic as well as difficulty percentage. When reviewing the top 25 listings for each keyword it looks like the same sites rank in the SERPs between 1-8 and then after that it is completely different. So, is there a better keyword to target? Are these two keywords different enough to truly have separate search results?
Keyword Research | | kchandler
The top 8 results didn't even target "print-and-apply" in there content or title tags... Thanks for the input/discussion - Kyle0 -
Keyword management - where do i start?
Hi all, i am a starting out SEO. I have recently been browsing our keyword rankings report and noticed that we are very low down on some quite key search terms. I therefor want to focus over the next few weeks, on bringing us up the rankings for these specific terms. Apologies if this is a very basic one, but**,.... I dont know where to start!** I would be very interested if anyone can give me some advice on a plan of action. What actions should be in my action plan? For example, if i wanted to improve our rankings on the following: English school in malta Learning english in malta English classes in malta
Keyword Research | | Exp0