The year 2021 marks the beginning of Google’s much-anticipated and delayed move to mobile-first indexing for all websites.
To better understand this situation, we analyzed the search landscape to see how mobile and desktop trends have formed in recent years, with two areas of focus to guide our study:
- To see how traffic trends and user behavior on mobile stack up compared to desktop, we analyzed traffic data from the top 1,000 most visited domains from the Global Traffic Rank reports for 2018, 2019, and 2020.
- To highlight the SERP differences between mobile and desktop, we took the top 50,000 keywords by search volume in Semrush’s US database and compared the search results.
Mobile vs. Desktop Study: Key Findings
- Search traffic jumped 22% in 2020 compared to 2019 for the world’s 1,000 most visited sites.
- During this period, 66% of all qatar telegram data site visits came from mobile devices.
- Bounce rates were higher and total time on site was lower on both mobile and desktop, indicating that user engagement is becoming increasingly difficult.
- Only 17% of websites retained their position in both mobile and desktop SERPs, and 37% of URLs dropped out of the top 10 when the search query was made from a mobile device.
Let’s take a closer look at these results and see what they can mean for you.
Global Search Traffic Trends
Comparing the search data of the world’s 1,000 most visited websites from 2019 to 2020, we see that the absolute traffic volume increased by 22%.
What’s more, these sites attracted 10% of total global traffic in 2018, but that figure had doubled to 20% by the end of 2020. This traffic molly baynes sr. manager, procurement was primarily mobile, with these devices driving around 66% of all visits last year, while the share of desktop traffic was also higher in 2020 than in 2018.
This is largely due to the coronavirus pandemic, but it’s a clear sign of the global dominance of these leading sites; the bigger they are, the more traffic they will attract when more searches are made on mobile and desktop.
User Engagement Signals
The increase in traffic levels has been accompanied by an apparent decline in user engagement on these sites, with behavioral indicators such as bounce rate and time on site showing a consistent negative trend for both mobile and desktop searches.
Average time on site: mobile vs desktop
As expected, desktop visits were 40% longer than mobile visits in 2020.
The average time spent on-site by desktop users actually increased by 3% in 2020, while the equivalent on mobile continued its annual database d decline. Still, users have been spending less time on sites on average since 2018, regardless of the device they’re using, which may be another sign of shortening attention spans .
Average bounce rate: mobile vs desktop
The slight increase in time spent on the site via a computer also led to an increase in the average bounce rate over most of 2020.