You’ve finally scored those coveted Featured Snippets on the search engine result page, and that’s awesome. There’s just one thing.
While the snippets pop up when you search for specific keywords on desktop, nothing happens on mobile. In fact, it looked as if you never landed the coveted spot in the first place.
Analysts at Rank Ranger have suggested what may be responsible for this inconsistency. According to their 30-day study, Google shows Featured Snippets on desktop 13 percent more often than mobile.
It all began with a simple question:
Does Google use the same URLs for both mobile and desktop Featured Snippets?
At the beginning of the study, the analysts wanted to understand how consistent Featured Snippet URLs are across devices. So, they conducted a study.
Rank Ranger reviewed 256 keywords that produced Featured Snippets on desktop. Then, they compared these URLs within these snippets with their mobile versions.
Chief marketing officer of Rank Ranger, Mordy Oberstein wrote in a blog post:
“Specifically, we tracked the URL within a Featured Snippet over a 30-day period and recorded the percentage of days during the period where the URL was consistent across both devices.”
Findings from the study suggest that the keyword dataset produced a desktop Featured Snippet 86.5 percent of the time over the 30 days compared with 73.3 percent of the time on mobile.
Then, the analysts considered instances where, on a given day, the desktop had a featured snippet, but the mobile didn’t. This resulted in the URL matching 70 percent of the time during the study period.
Finally, they factored in instances where a keyword produced a desktop but not a mobile Featured Snippet, and the percentage of URLs that matched across both devices rose to 90 percent.
In the end, the study showed that there’s a higher chance that Google will show a desktop Featured Snippet for a specific keyword. As a result, publishers are more likely to score a Featured Snippet on desktop than mobile.
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