Research conducted on the UK’s top nine supermarkets according to their search visibility has lauded Tesco for adapting quickly to the changes enforced by Google during ‘mobilegeddon’.

A tweak to the engine’s ranking for sites across smartphone and tablets has placed emphasis on retailers to make their domains ‘mobile ready’. Supermarkets are seeing an increasing amount of purchase journeys starting on mobile, meaning the pressure to be visible on mobile as well as desktop search is greater than ever.

According to a report from SEO software group Searchmetrics, Tesco.com is the most equipped mobile site with a visibility score of 633,970, calculated by methods including the number of times a domain appears in the results pages for a specific set of keywords.

Asda.com proves a fairly distant rival with a score of 200,804, with Sainsbury placing third on 80,936. 

Considering Tesco’s mobile score of 633,970 alongside desktop visibility of 607,450, Asda’s 200,804 for mobile compared with a 193,697 for desktop, and Sainsbury’s 80,936 and 81,675 for the same, the table showed that Google’s algorithm may not have carried a massive amount of impact.

On the flipside, taking similarities between both sets of scores into account, supermarkets may have committed a great deal of attention to getting their mobile SEO right. 

A similar story?

Further down the table, Waitrose.com placed fourth a visibility score of 38,695 on mobile and 41,081 on desktop. 

The supermarkets were well-separated in general, with Waitrose’s mobile score beating Morrisons’ by nearly 10,000 points and Aldi being 5,000 behind the latter. 

In general, the scores for desktop and mobile remained fairly similar, which Searchmetrics’ CTO Marcus Tober put down to hard work in the ramp up to Google’s big algorithm change on April 21.

“When Google announced its mobile-friendly update, there was speculation about the major impact it could potentially have on brands. However, our analysis indicates that the effect has not been significant on the leading supermarket retail sites we included in the research. Probably because they made sure their sites were already well optimised for mobile phones,” he explained. 

Tober said that some of the bigger changes in visibility will have been witnessed by smaller sites, who may not have invested as much in their mobile user experiences. 

Here is the supermarket search visibility table in full.