Why are mobile search results different?
Published on October 1, 2022
Published on Wealthy Affiliate — a platform for building real online businesses with modern training and AI.
Just a quick success story here to keep us 'WA-rriors' motivated :-)
I woke up this morning having published only 13 hours previously. With bleary eyes I did a quick search on my mobile and there is my post ranked at #3 in Google [happy dance]. Checked on desktop and the post is nowhere to be seen. So why are mobile search results different?
I was fascinated so I did a bit of digging around and now I know a little about Google’s mobile-first indexing shenanigans. It’s probably old news to you veterans here seeing as Google rolled this out in March 2021, although I think there was a bit of a delay.
Anyway, it seems Google now sends out the mobile crawler first, before the traditional desktop crawler. I’m thinking this explains why my page has appeared in the mobile results first.
As always, if anyone here knows differently, please enlighten me!
There’s some good info here on the SearchMetrics blog with tips to improve your site’s performance on mobile - pretty important in today’s mobile world!
Ready to put this into action?
Start your free journey today — no credit card required.
I’m hoping this SERP position is indicative of where I will also rank on desktop. We’ll see!
During my electronic travels I also discovered a way to view your mobile SERP using a desktop device … if you’re using the Chrome browser:
- Search your keyword in an incognito window - this is the desktop SERP.
- CTRL + T for a new tab and search the keyword again.
- Right click anywhere in the blank space and click ‘Inspect’
- You will see the code appear on the right hand side of the page.
- In the top left of the code window you will see a little mobile icon.
- Click that and refresh the page (you may need to refresh 2 or 3 times).
- You will now see the mobile SERP.
- Change the device to your preference at the top of the page!
Pretty cool huh?
Using this technique you can easily compare your mobile SERP with the desktop version by switching tabs.
Lo and behold, it shows exactly the same results as I see on my mobile device and they’re slightly different to the desktop results.
Hope that helps someone today :-)
Have a productive day my WA family! Keep on keeping on.
Rohan.
Share this insight
This conversation is happening inside the community.
Join free to continue it.The Internet Changed. Now It Is Time to Build Differently.
If this article resonated, the next step is learning how to apply it. Inside Wealthy Affiliate, we break this down into practical steps you can use to build a real online business.
No credit card. Instant access.