Google is rolling out continuous scrolling on mobile search.
Google is introducing continuous scrolling on mobile search. What does that mean?
When you search something on Google, look at the first page where it lists around 10 links with descriptions. After that people need to click or tap on the next page.
But the SEO track record of the second page is not very good. Search results appearing on the Google’s second page get less than 1% CTR. A major chunk of clicks are consumed by the links appearing on the first page.
In fact, appearing among the top results is so important that the first link that appears in the search results gets 25% clicks (source).
Consequently, whoever wants to improve his or her search engine rankings, wants to appear on the first page because not many people go to the second page.
Nonetheless, Google has discovered that when people are searching on the mobile phone, the check out up to 4 pages.
Besides, it doesn’t make any sense to make people click the next page when they can simply scroll through all the listings. Let them scroll as much as they want, I would say, even on the desktop. There is no UI logic of dividing the search results among different pages.
There may have been a psychological reason a few years ago when people were mostly using the search engine on their desktops, but on mobile phones, people don’t mind scrolling.
The continuous scrolling feature will definitely improve the CTR of many web pages and blog posts.
If people are abandoning the current search because they wouldn’t go to the second page, even on desktop, they may keep on scrolling until they find something click-worthy.