Request a demo

BrightEdge Research: Mobile-First Index, Rank and Content Differences

BrightEdge SEO Blog
blog hero image

enewton@brightedge.com
enewton@brightedge.com
M Posted 8 years 12 months ago
t 9 min read

Since mid-2015, when Google first announced that mobile search had overtaken desktop in the United States and a few other countries, mobile growth has drawn attention from brands across the board. This announcement occurred around the same time as Google’s announcement of the April 2015 mobile SERP algo change, which rewarded mobile-optimized sites and thereby penalized unoptimized sites.

BrightEdge Latest Research on the Mobile SERP

At BrightEdge, we conduct research to help our clients and the industry remain abreast of these changes and challenges within the digital ecosystem. The better people understand how customers use their mobile devices and what they expect to see when interacting in the digital space, the easier it is to meet these expectations. We researched the behavior of mobile users as well as how the SERP differs between mobile and desktop.

Percentage of differences between mobile SERP & tablet versus desktop - brightedge

Some of our key findings included:

  • 57 percent of traffic now comes from mobile and tablet search
  • 79 percent of keywords overall change in rank between mobile and desktop
  • 47 percent of keywords in positions 1-20 rank differently between mobile and desktop
  • 35 percent of the time the first page that ranks for a domain on a query differs between mobile and desktop

brightedge mobile serp example - what is seo

What the Latest Mobile SERP Research Means for Marketers

It is clear from the information taken from our research that a fundamental shift must take place for marketers. Instead of creating websites for desktop users and then ensuring that those websites are "compatible" with mobile devices, some of the website content should be created and optimized for mobile users first.

When this shift takes places for marketers, they will find that mobile optimization strategies for users will come more naturally. They will need to start performing mobile-specific keyword research and tracking to better understand the phrasing that mobile users employ when making queries.

"Mobile traffic is huge for us and our industry — above the 57% BrightEdge is reporting. We are developing content with a mobile-first perspective to connect with our users with info, use advice, and reviews – especially when they are near a store where they can easily purchase."

Carlos Spallarossa, Director of SEO, L'Oréal

Brands also need to design websites that will be friendly for mobile users, including the navigation menus, the style of content -- some videos, for example, do not play on mobile devices, and even basic functions like buttons should be built with mobile, and their touchscreens, in mind.

The continued growth of mobile means that brands cannot overlook the importance of their on-the-go users. The impending mobile-first algorithm from Google is only one sign of these rapid changes. Our BrightEdge research on the mobile SERP and usage clearly demonstrates that the time for a mobile-first mentality is now.

Access BrightEdge's full list of how to improve mobile planning and results by reading the full report.

 

Since mid-2015, when Google first announced that mobile search had overtaken desktop in the United States and a few other countries, mobile growth has drawn attention from brands across the board. This announcement occurred around the same time as Google’s announcement of the April 2015 mobile algo change, which rewarded mobile-optimized sites and thereby penalized […]

The post BrightEdge Research: Mobile Share, Mobile-First Index, and Rank and Content Differences appeared first on BrightEdge SEO Blog.

Understand how SEO drives content performance

Page Reporting identifies the content that drives brand engagement and customer actions so you can repeat success, over and over.

featured image

Page Reporting provides deep insights to help you identify the content that drives business results. Slice and dice the data to develop page-level insights, or click to review detailed SEO recommendations, thanks to the power of the BrightEdge platform.

Your mission control for content performance

Use Page Reporting to identify and measure the content that drives performance/conversion. Blend in web analytics data to learn how SEO investments impact traffic, conversions, and revenue site-wide – either by content category or at the individual page level.

Identify and replicate the content that wins the hearts of your visitors

Find out the content that drives the lion’s share of your website revenue. Analyze how efficient different page groups are in completing their own conversion goals. Assess how engaging your content page or page groups are as measured by website visits, time on site, bounce rate, and more.

Unmatched power of rich insights

You can view content performance across desktops, smartphones, and tablets. Gain page URL-level insights on search ranking, backlinks, social signals, and website metrics, such as conversion rate. Customize your view with column field chooser, and save your data view by directly adding the chart to StoryBuilder dashboard for faster access in the future.

Reveal new content insights

Discover high revenue generating pages to track SEO plans within Page Reporting. Review automatically created page events to correlate content changes with page revenue improvements. Create Anomaly Detection alerts when BrightEdge detects on-page element changes.

One hub to launch optimization workflows

Easily access optimization recommendations. Add Page Reporting charts into StoryBuilder dashboards for high-level performance analysis. Track performance of every keyword associated with a page, then dig into Keyword Reporting for more insights.

See the Latest in SEO Innovation

Get a BrightEdge demo and custom proposal

REQUEST A DEMO

Build the business case for organic search

Use StoryBuilder to create the dashboards that elevate the role of organic search.

featured image

StoryBuilder is mission control for digital marketers. With robust and flexible visualization capabilities, StoryBuilder can help you make data-driven decisions and elevate the role of the website. Use executive dashboards to showcase the positive impact on brand equity and revenue from website optimization efforts. Build convincing business cases for additional resources.

Tie SEO investments to business outcomes via a unified data hub

StoryBuilder blends search engine, web analytics, and proprietary BrightEdge data to help you correlate the exact insights you need. Show how your content aligns with customers’ search intent, drives business outcome, and impacts brand equity.

Build powerful dashboards with one click

Use one-click templates to quickly build dashboards for program performance, buyer’s journey, competitive landscape, and more. Toggle between visualizations. Customize data fields, date ranges, and filters to get precise data views. Export reports or schedule data distribution to share insights with the team.

BrightEdge StoryBuilder helps us drive SEO support throughout the company by painting the picture of where we were in search and how we could improve.
Jeanne Quach, Maxim Integrated

Act on your insights

StoryBuilder enables quick decisions and actions. Pull web analytics data into dashboards to understand how content investments drive website traffic, conversions, and revenue. Inspect charts and tables further by directly clicking to detailed Page Reporting, Keyword Reporting, Share of Voice, and other reports.

See the Latest in SEO Innovation

Get a BrightEdge demo and custom proposal

REQUEST A DEMO

Maximize performance across all digital channels

Use Site Report to track the performance of marketing channels that drive website traffic. Identify the best-performing content pages to codify winning formulas.

featured image

Site Reporting helps you to track and analyze your sites to ensure they are driving business and bringing content to the right pages.

Ensure your content can be found by search engines

See the number of indexed pages over time for your site and your competitors’ sites. Identify and address content or technical issues to ensure all your pages are discovered by search engines.

Uncover the content that search engines and visitors love

Analyze Clicks and Impressions to understand how often your content pages show up on SERPs, how that visibility trends over time, and how often customers click on your content links, translating into organic traffic.

Review performance by digital channel

Website visitors acquired through organic, PPC, social, direct, and other channels may not convert at the same rate. Site Report helps you identify top-performing channels by measuring conversions and revenue.

Take quick action on insights

From Site Report, you can easily add a chart or table to StoryBuilder to customize your dashboards. Site Report also gives you quick access to Keyword Reporting or Page Reporting to review SEO recommendations based on keyword or website page.

See the Latest in SEO Innovation

Get a BrightEdge demo and custom proposal

REQUEST A DEMO

Grow site visits with actionable SEO recommendations

BrightEdge Recommendations improves the SEO performance of your site with prescriptive instructions for every content page.

featured image

Recommendations help you improve organic visibility and relevance with your target audience by providing detailed SEO recommendations of your existing content. Review detailed optimization instructions and assign tasks to relevant team members.

Boost organic visits and conversions with optimized content

Recommendations lift the veil of key SEO ranking factors and provide you with prescriptive instructions to optimize. Each recommended action is unique to your content page and its own competition. Review estimated impact on SEO by each optimization tactic to prioritize your resources for maximized outcome.

Complete winning strategies to improve each page

Based on existing content, Recommendations surface comprehensive on-page and off-page enhancement recommendations, including page title, H1 tag, backlinks, and others. But its power doesn’t stop here. The AI-powered engine adapts to new sets of recommendations if new target keywords are added or new customized SEO rules are defined. All from within Recommendations.

We can drill into any page and look at the specific recommendations on a page level. This helps us improve our content marketing. BrightEdge innovations really have helped us drive forward in our overall strategy.
Dave Lloyd, Adobe Systems Incorporated

Scale SEO optimization programs to launch content faster

Assign each optimization action to relevant subject matter owners from directly within the platform. Once the task is completed an automated site event tag will be created to help you keep track of the content change history. Tie business ROI to SEO optimization by correlating these events with improvements in site metrics.

Drive productivity with Copilot Generative AI

Copilot is seamlessly integrated into BrightEdge Recommendations’ workflow, leveraging the full power of the BrightEdge platform to suggest accurate and high-quality optimizations. There's no need to navigate to another page or utilize a separate tool to tap into the benefits of Generative AI. It is all in one place and ready to go when you are. And with a simple single click, you can not only record a suggestion into the BrightEdge Recommendations but also effortlessly track its activation on your website.

Optimize Multiple Pages at Once with Google Search Console Integration

Elevate your SEO workflow with Copilot for Mass Recommendations! This system integrates directly with Google Search Console, aligning the most impactful keywords to each page. Harness the power of Generative AI to create the perfect titles and descriptions across multiple pages on one screen. Boost SEO productivity and target with unprecedented accuracy directly from Google. Eliminate time consuming individual page edits and amplify your entire site's optimization—in just minutes!

See the Latest in SEO Innovation

Get a BrightEdge demo and custom proposal

REQUEST A DEMO

FAQ's

BrightEdge Recommendations surfaces prescriptive, page-level instructions, not generic advice. Every recommendation is unique to that specific page and its competitive landscape, with an estimated impact score so teams know which actions to prioritize first. Adobe's SEO team cited BrightEdge Recommendations as a core driver of their content marketing strategy, specifically because the page-level drill-down replaced hours of manual analysis with actionable next steps.

BrightEdge Recommendations ties optimization actions directly to business outcomes. When a recommended change is implemented, the platform automatically creates a site event tag,  allowing you to correlate that specific content change with improvements in traffic, rankings, and conversions. This creates a direct line between SEO actions and revenue impact, giving marketing leaders a defensible ROI number rather than a correlation.

BrightEdge Recommendations includes AI-powered content gap analysis that surfaces missing FAQ coverage, weak structured formatting, and prompt-level visibility gaps, the factors that determine whether your content gets cited by AI engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overview. The Copilot integration generates optimized titles, descriptions, and content suggestions directly inside the recommendations workflow without switching tools.

Unlike standalone SEO suggestion tools, BrightEdge Recommendations is built on the full BrightEdge data platform,  meaning recommendations are informed by DataCube search volume, competitor ranking data, and Google Search Console signals simultaneously. Alternatives like Semrush's on-page checker or Conductor's recommendations operate on a single data source. BrightEdge combines all three, and uniquely adapts recommendations dynamically when you add new target keywords or custom SEO rules.

BrightEdge S3 Recommendations integrates directly with Google Search Console to align the highest-impact keywords to each page automatically. Tasks can be assigned to specific team members from within the platform, with automated event tracking when changes go live. The Copilot mass recommendations feature lets teams optimize titles and descriptions across multiple pages simultaneously, eliminating individual page-by-page editing for large sites.

Forecast the Impact of SEO

Opportunity Forecasting provides you with the projected impact content and search optimizations will have on key metrics to help you prioritize projects and make stronger business cases for your initiatives.

featured image

Forecast SEO performance with confidence. Building the business case for SEO has never been easier. Opportunity Forecasting automates the process to calculate the total addressable market and your potential gains in revenue or site traffic with the push of a button. Create campaign targets for your content projects and prioritize efforts based on predicted ROI.

Use Detailed Models to Outline the Organic Possibilities

View forecasts in several modes for each keyword group: revenue, conversions, website traffic, and more. Build your business cases for different stakeholders using the SEO forecasting data.

Discover Your Market Opportunity with Custom SEO Forecasts

Maximize the reliability and relevance of your forecasts by viewing projections in aggressive, medium, or conservative scenarios. Customization variables include revenue estimates for conversions, conversion rate, search volume increase, or ranking improvement for selected keywords.

Get Recommendations to Improve Rank and Customer Engagement

Clarify your course of action with just a few clicks. Click Recommendations to view top SEO optimization and keyword-level performance reporting recommendations for any keyword. Use the insights to establish, confirm, adjust or redirect your course of action.

See the Latest in SEO Innovation

Get a BrightEdge demo and custom proposal

REQUEST A DEMO

Comprehensive SEO Keyword Ranking Management

Keyword Reporting tracks ranking and performance for high-value keywords that drive organic search results.

featured image

Identify your most valuable keywords, track their performance and prioritize your efforts by gleaning insights from rich data sets, including search volume, ranking position, universal results and more.

Detailed Keyword Data

Hone in on specific aspects of keyword volume and rank. Develop granular insights about keyword performance by desktop, smartphone, or tablet or by geographical relevance for over 70,000 local and global locations with HyperLocal. For each keyword uncover which page URL should be set as your preferred landing page.

Keyword Tracking and Performance Monitoring

Keyword Reporting's trend graphs give you quick perspective into the performance of your content -- and your competition’s -- over weeks, months, and quarters. Track whether your brand is becoming more visible on top SERPs and in Universal Results. See how impressions, clicks, estimated visits, and revenue trend over time for every topic using BrightEdge’s proprietary measures.

Track Keyword Ranking of Your Competitors

Understand how you perform against the competition at the keyword level. Measure and track share of voice and identify key topics for which you are not currently ranking. Leverage these topics to create content opportunities.

Monitor Changes To The SERP Layout

Keyword Reporting provides insights into the how the SERP layout adapts to each keyword. Understand your potential and actual presence in other types of search results, like Google Quick Answers, videos, or Local 3 Packs. Use Intent Signal to track your content presence above the fold on SERPs and to coordinate organic and paid search initiatives to maximize site traffic acquisition.

What BrightEdge enabled us to do is to really look at the keyword level -- how each keyword is performing on a monthly basis and where it’s ranking and how that feeds back into our campaign.
Matt Brown, American Express Europe - Unique Digital

Act on Your Keyword Insights

Natively integrated within the BrightEdge platform, Keyword Reporting delivers analysis and recommendations that drive action. Simply click on any keyword to get recommendations for the content you wish to rank for. Pull keyword data into StoryBuilder dashboards and reports to understand and communicate the impact of topic demand and content performance on the business, then take specific action to maximize performance.

See the Latest in SEO Innovation

Get a BrightEdge demo and custom proposal

REQUEST A DEMO

Outsmart the SERPs for SEO Success

Intent Signal identifies the content most likely to rank above the fold on search results pages (SERP), which is essential to growing website traffic

featured image

SERP layouts are always changing, with shifting content types taking over the precious above-the-fold space on the results page. Intent Signal takes away the guesswork to help you develop content and SEO strategies that yield the best results: the results people see without scrolling.

Improve Your SEO Content Performance

Intent Signal helps you understand how your content ranks in search against competitors so you can refine content in four key ways:

  • DEFEND existing content that ranks above the fold
  • OPTIMIZE existing content that ranks below the fold to improve its rank
  • CREATE new content around topics that have the opportunity to be shown above the fold organically
  • COLLABORATE with your paid team on topics that lack organic listing opportunities above the fold

Research Your Competitors and Enhance Your SEO

Use Intent Signal to focus your efforts on the pages that are most critical to defend or that offer the greatest opportunity to overtake your competitors above the fold. Triangulate insights from Intent Signal with other data, such as search volume and SEO ranking position to prioritize your to-do list. Then follow built-in recommendations to optimize your content for SEO.

It’s exciting to have actionable data to back up our strategy in the often-nebulous space of SEO / SEM. BrightEdge Intent Signal helps us take away the guesswork.
Courtney Lear Wallace, Unique Vintage

Blend Organic and Paid Search Efforts to Increase Site Traffic

Intent Signal reveals keywords with no opportunity for above-the-fold organic listings on the SERP. These keywords call for collaboration with your paid search team. Deploy pay-per-click (PPC) ads to capitalize on search intent for these keywords and evaluate performance over time to further improve results.

Platform Integration: Intent Signal is Everywhere

Natively integrated within the BrightEdge platform, Intent Signal delivers performance insights across your SEO and marketing efforts. Refine your content and search optimization priorities by including Intent Signal measures in your Keyword Reporting. Track above-the-fold performance in StoryBuilder dashboards. Get Anomaly Detection alerts when your key pages change in above-the-fold status.

See the Latest in SEO Innovation

Get a BrightEdge demo and custom proposal

REQUEST A DEMO

SEO Strategies To Drive Local Traffic To Your Site

Tailor your local SEO strategy to distinct local markets by mapping out precise search volume and ranking data for each keyword in every city or country that Google Search supports

featured image

Search is local. The same search from two adjacent cities may yield different organic and paid search results. Winning local SEO starts with analyzing search volume and ranking data as close as possible to your target locations to earn customers for your brick-and-mortar stores.

Gain Precision of Local Search Demand and Content Performance

Get organic search engine volume and ranking insights for over 72,000 cities in the U.S and worldwide and analyze the data by desktop or mobile device. Use Google's default locations or define custom locations using HyperLocal's filters to better manage your local SEO efforts.

Analyze Local Search Market Near Your Business

Track how well your local listings show up for searches conducted in the area surrounding your retail locations. Run side-by-side comparisons against local competitors and use the insights to develop content that will win you greater share of voice on local search engine results pages (SERP).

Your Local SEO Strategy in One Place for Quick Results

The BrightEdge platform provides a seamless workflow to complete local SEO optimization projects faster. Discover new keywords from Data Cube. Easily access optimization recommendations. Add Page Reporting charts into StoryBuilder dashboards for on-going performance measurement. Track performance of every local SEO target keyword and dig into Keyword Reporting for more insights.

See the Latest in SEO Innovation

Get a BrightEdge demo and custom proposal

REQUEST A DEMO
Subscribe to
,