One of our favorite and most popular studies from last year looked at the value of Google result positioning, and told the world how much of Google’s traffic goes to the top spot, second spot, and so on. What about mobile, though; is there a difference?
We wanted to know. So we took a look at traffic by Google result for iPad users and found that the #1 spot is much less dominant in the touchscreen environment – in fact, the top spot only got 20% of overall Google traffic. Still by far the biggest chunk, but lower than the 34% that the top spot gets for overall desktop traffic.
It appears from the data that iPad users are more willing to scroll to find the answers to their queries, and even go to multiple pages. Perhaps this can be attributed to the touchscreen interface, or the fact that search behavior isn’t yet ingrained in tablet users like it is in desktop and laptop users.
Either way, all we know is that websites that don’t rank #1 on Google appear to do better on iPads than they do on other devices. We’ll look into more devices to see if there’s a correlation between touchscreen and search equity, or if it’s simply an iPad phenomenon.
For those of you out there who own an iPad or another tablet, do you find yourself scrolling through search results more than usual?
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