More and more B2B buyers are using mobile devices, like smartphones and tablets, to do purchase research. A Demand Gen Report found that while 99% of B2B buyers use desktop devices to access content, 82% of those B2B buyers also using smartphones to access content. Fifty-six percent of them are using tablets. Those are large percentages. If those B2B buyers are accessing content using mobile devices, they’re certainly using mobile devices for B2B organic search.
Your domain’s top organic result for a given query can be different for mobile searchers.
Research by BrightEdge found that 35% of the time the top organic search result for a given query will return a different ranking for desktop users than it does for mobile searchers for a given domain.
Okay, what does that mean?
Here’s an example:
Let’s say you sell bike racks to cities, townships, counties, and corporate property owners. A potential B2B buyer submits a Google query for “municipal bike storage” using their desktop browser. Your domain’s highest organic ranking shows up as the 6th search result. Not bad; could be better.
Now, let’s say the same searcher uses the same query on Google on her smartphone. Now your domain’s highest organic ranking shows up as the 11th result.
In this case, you are far more likely to get click-through from a desktop user than you are from a mobile user. For desktop searchers, you’re on the first page of the search results. For the mobile searcher, you’re on the second page of the search results.
The research by BrightEdge found that this change in ranking between desktop and mobile happened 35% of the time.
B2B Mobile Optimization is Important
As more and more B2B buyers use mobile devices like smartphones and tablets to do purchase research, you have to optimize your site and its pages not only for desktop, but for mobile devices as well. If you only monitor how you’re doing in desktop search results, you may be looking at only half the picture. B2B mobile SEO is a vital part of an overall organic search strategy for B2B marketers. This week, do ten sample searchers for your company using the same query and search engine on both desktop and mobile. Write down your findings. How does your domain fair? If you don’t like the results you see, maybe it’s time to do something about it.
