Continuous Scrolling: How We Got Here and What SEOs Need to Know

Continuous scrolling has arrived on Google for mobile. If you’re searching in English in the U.S., you might have already noticed the change on mobile search engine results pages (SERPs). If not, then consider yourself warned.

Soon worldwide, the first page of Google will become four times longer. That means results will appear as you scroll for what was equivalent to four results pages. What could this update mean for your SEO efforts and your competitor research and why was it introduced to start with?

Let’s dive in.

Why the move to continuous scrolling?

According to Google’s announcement, most people who want information beyond page-one browse up to four pages. That requires pressing “See more” up to three times, which isn’t exactly user-friendly.

Continuous scrolling aims at making the user experience (UX) smoother and helping searchers find what they’re looking for faster. After all, Google’s commitment to improving UX and building trust is what keeps users clicking and ad click revenue climbing.

The other big benefit of continuous scrolling: More space for rich results.

Indeed, continuous scrolling allows Google to integrate rich results while maintaining the real SERP, or organic link results.

People who want information beyond page-one browse up to four pages Tweet this

And more rich results are already rolling out and will consume even more SERP space, including multiple data sources, rich snippets, larger images in SERP, and the multi-unified model (MUM), which will help the search engine answer more complex queries. You can expect even more to come ahead.

The update will undoubtedly influence the way searchers interact with SERP. The question is how.

How could the update influence SEO?

To keep your website’s traffic climbing and outpacing competitors’ websites as SERPs evolve, you need to adapt your strategy accordingly.

Here are three ways continuous scrolling might affect SEO:

1. The importance of page one

Up until now, many SEO strategies and content strategies may have prioritized ranking on the first page. After all, CTRs drop as users scroll down through search results, but even the lowest results on page one have a CTR of about 3%. This is significantly better than CTRs on page two, which are less than 1%.

It’s no secret that the top search results get the most clicks. In fact, the very first result has a click-through rate (CTR) of about 30%. Tweet this

With four times the results, landing on page one will no longer mean what it once did on mobile.

The results that showed up on page two, three, or four in the past could get more impressions. On the flip side, the fact that page one will now approximately four times the links listed overall also means more exposure for all sites, or, more competition. But there’s more to consider.

2. Click-through rates and scrolling

Continuous scrolling is ushering in a newsfeed-like that could translate into fewer clicks if users get their questions answered directly on the SERP.

However, CTRs for links that once ranked on page two or three could get a boost with the added exposure.

It isn’t yet clear how continuous scrolling will affect CTRs. So, this is something you’ll want to closely monitor using marketing analytics tools (more on that below).

3. Ranking and visibility

With so much importance given to high rankings, you want to make sure your website gets as much visibility as possible so it doesn’t get lost on the results page.

Google uses multiple ranking factors, including the content on your page, linking pages, as well as your website’s performance. To make sure your website has a better chance of being featured higher and in more SERP features, you should ask yourself the following questions:

1. Does my website have E-A-T? Demonstrating that your website has expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness is paramount to ranking higher. Though many factors within this topic are complex and take longer-term optimization, you can help improve your E-A-T by writing high-quality and valuable content, using field-expert authors, accumulating backlinks from other authoritative sites, ensuring your domain is secure, and more.
2. How does my website perform once it is clicked? Google measures core web vitals to determine your website’s domain authority and the rankings for specific pages.. These include the time it takes to render content elements, response time, and the way the website’s layout shifts during loading.

What could this mean for ads?

While Google said continuous scrolling will not affect how the ad auction works or the way Ad Rank is calculated, there are other potential results to consider.

Paid search results typically appear on the top of each page. With continuous scrolling, Google could position ads within search results the way Facebook and Instagram integrate ads into the newsfeed. This makes it even more difficult for users to distinguish organic content from paid ads, which can lead to higher bounce rates and confusion.

And similar to organic links, users might scroll more and click less in general.

Tools to track the impact of continuous scrolling

Only time will tell exactly how your website’s search performance will be affected by continuous scrolling. For now, there are several tools that can help you monitor, measure, and analyze changes in your website’s SERP performance:

Google Search Console

Assess your pages mobile CTR changes for different queries.

Using Google Search Central, you can discover low-ranking content that suddenly performs better, or high-ranking content with a CTR that has been hit by this change.

Keyword Analysis

With Similarweb’s Keyword Analysis tool you can monitor and analyze your target keywords’ performance in the new mobile SERP, discover keywords with unchanged ranking but declining search performance, analyze zero click queries, and quickly identify increased traffic for other keywords and react first.

You can also assess the impact on your competitors’ websites, compare, and benchmark your post-update performance easily.

Top Organic Pages

You can find your organic competitors’ top performing page in mobile search with Similarweb’s Top Organic Pages tool. This makes it simple to analyze traffic trend changes over time.

Looking at keyword level data, as shown below, you can pull actionable data needed to adjust your SEO strategy accordingly.

When prepping for the impact of this update, you should anticipate the upcoming Google changes to plan your next move to stay ahead. I’ll walk you through the factors that led up to the continuous scroll update and what it could tell you about the types of updates to expect ahead.

How to prepare for the next SERP evolution?

The best way to understand what to optimize for next is to understand what brought us here.

When reviewing the changes over the past seven years, we can easily spot five main factors that led Google to this point.

Mobile-first indexing

In 2015, mobile searches overtook desktop searches for the first time. That year, mobile-only users also surpassed desktop-only users.

By 2020, 55.4% of the online population worldwide purchased something on mobile.

Over the years, Google made many changes to improve the mobile experience, including:

• Creating guidelines
• Offering testing tools
• Introducing paid and organic features on mobile SERP

Nevertheless, their push toward mobile, user-friendly sites wasn’t adopted across the board, and was sometimes even ignored completely.

Enter: mobile-first indexing.

While mobile-first indexing was initially announced in November 2016, it was rolled out on July 1, 2019.

From that point on Google would first crawl the mobile version of the page (vs. desktop), and website ranking would be dictated by the mobile version of the website.

Any site owner who hadn’t made their website mobile-friendly by then was to expect major changes in ranking.

Ahead, you can expect more updates to support the mobile UX experience.

User page experience & Core web vitals (CWV)

Page loading speed has been a major priority for Google. The search giant wants content to load fast for the best possible, you guessed it, UX.

Mobile browsing is usually done on-the-go and people are often looking for quick answers.

Despite the fact that Google provided guides, created tests, tools, and new technologies like AMP to support this initiative, mobile websites were still slower and heavier than desktop.

In May 2020, the company made UX impossible to ignore, by introducing the concept of core web vitals and then making them ranking factors.

From that moment on a website’s speed, responsiveness, and visual stability would influence where pages appeared in the search results.

Bottom line: Websites that uphold CWV standards essentially provide better UX for users and therefore are more likely to rank higher than others in SERPs. Future updates are likely to reflect the same values.

Rich Snippets and the E-A-T concept

Introduced in 2014, E-A-T refers to the expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness of content on websites.

These are crucial elements when it comes to content ranking, but are not ranking factors themselves.

Having said that, websites that publish expert content, build their authority in their field, and gain users’ trust also often win higher positions on SERPs.

How is E-A-T related to continuous scrolling visibility?

In the past few years we saw the introduction of featured snippets, as well as fake news that’s shown the world how critical accurate data and fact-checking really is. Featured snippets will mostly be populated with the most accurate and relevant data.

This means that websites that optimize for E-A-T have a higher chance to be chosen to be featured.

If Google continues to prioritize user trust you can anticipate more snippets and on-SERP services displaying relevant information.

Over recent years SERP features have evolved regularly, taking more space from the search results page, and pushing classic organic results below the fold. The addition of MUM into the SERP takes this a few steps further, which brings me to my next point.

AI and machine learning

Google’s latest update to the search engine user behavior analysis quality came in May 2021 with the introduction of the MUM.

Before MUM, there was first RankBrain, then came KnowledgeGraph and many submitted patents later we got BERT (DeepRank).

Here’s the scoop on MUM: If comparing two items, a user may need to search for both individually, and complete the comparison on their own. MUM uses T5 text-to-text framework, understands 75 languages, and is multimodal. That means it can extrapolate information from text, images, and in the future from videos and audio. This capability will help Google display accurate and relevant results for more complex searches that require information (and fact-checking) from multiple sources, once the AI learns and adapts to user behavior.

To prepare for potential upcoming changes, you want to make sure your content is comprehensive and offer true value & accurate answers to searchers.

Social competition climbs

While social media previously focused on keeping up with friends, over the last several years it became a platform for information. In fact, in 2021, about half of Americans said they get their news from social media.

Everything is available in the newsfeed, so users never press “Next” or “See more.”

It’s no secret that newsfeeds cause users to spend endless time scrolling and keep people in the apps longer.

Google’s continuous scrolling makes the SERP more like a newsfeed, presenting information in a more useful way.

Final thoughts

Continuous scrolling has been a long time coming. It was tested before, it’s backed up with Google’s vision, mission, and the past 10 years of algorithm updates and patent submissions.

Mobile search may only be the first step, after all we’re in a mobile-first index era. It only takes a quick look at SERP after this change to visualize the possible future.

As SEOs the best we can do is keep optimizing, monitor changes, and analyze the effects on mobile search results.

What we need to understand is that this is just the latest of many UX improvements in SERPs and it probably won’t be the last. We will see more design testing, relevant links, and changes in ad SERP display ahead.

We at Similarweb are closely watching how this change will influence websites over the next few months so stay tuned for our ongoing coverage and analysis.

In the meantime, remember to track your website traffic data, monitor CTR, and make sure your competitors don’t get the advantage.