Most SEO advice is written with smartphones in mind. That’s understandable — mobile accounts for the majority of global search volume, most industry benchmark data skews towards consumer behaviour, and the major platforms optimise their tooling and guidance accordingly.
For B2B businesses, this creates a quiet but persistent problem. You’re applying a framework built around a search experience that many of your buyers aren’t having.
Your buyers are still on desktop
B2B search behaviour is heavily weighted towards desktop. When someone is researching a software platform for their organisation, comparing service providers or evaluating a consultancy, they’re usually sitting at a screen with multiple tabs open — not scrolling on their phone during a commute.
This matters more now than it did a couple of years ago, because the desktop and smartphone SERP experiences have diverged considerably. And the desktop version is meaningfully better for organic visibility.
STAT’s January 2026 analysis found that organic results appear at position one on 49.8% of desktop SERPs, compared to 38.8% on smartphone. That’s an eleven percentage point gap. On mobile, more SERP features compete for the top of the page. On desktop, there’s less clutter, and organic holds its ground more reliably.
What the UK picture adds to this
If you’re a UK-based B2B business, there’s a further advantage worth knowing about. UK SERPs are less commercially loaded than US ones. Local packs, popular products, knowledge graphs and shopping results all appear less frequently in GB-en searches. Even with AI Overviews slightly more common in the UK than in the US, organic still takes a larger share of position one in UK searches.
The practical implication is that the organic opportunity in UK B2B search is considerably stronger than the global industry data would suggest. Industry benchmarks tend to skew heavily towards US consumer behaviour. If you’re using those numbers to set expectations, you may be underselling what’s actually achievable for your keyword set.
The mistake most B2B teams make
The default in most SEO setups is to track rankings without segmenting by device. You get an average position. Maybe you split by country. But the device split is skipped, often because the tooling requires a bit of extra configuration and nobody’s pushed for it.
The result is that you’re making strategic decisions based on blended data that doesn’t reflect how your actual audience is searching. You might be performing better on desktop than the overall numbers suggest — or worse. Without the split, you can’t tell.
There’s also a content implication. Desktop users tend to spend longer on page, read more deeply and are more likely to be in a considered research phase. The kind of content that serves a mobile user skimming for a quick answer is often not the same content that converts a B2B buyer doing due diligence. If your content strategy doesn’t account for that, you’re probably leaving something on the table.
Desktop SERPs are becoming more visual too
One caveat worth noting: the gap between desktop and smartphone is narrowing. The STAT data shows desktop SERPs moving steadily in the direction of the mobile experience — more visual, more features, more competition at the top of the page. Smartphone SERPs have been a reasonable indicator of where desktop was heading, and in 2025 that direction became clearer.
This doesn’t undermine the case for prioritising desktop in B2B. It means the window where desktop offers a structural organic advantage is real but not permanent. Businesses that build strong organic positions now — while that advantage exists — will be better placed as the two experiences converge.
What to do with this
Start by getting device-segmented data for your most important keyword sets. Not your full keyword universe — your ten or twenty highest-value terms. See what the SERP actually looks like for each of them on desktop versus mobile. You may be surprised by the difference.
From there, build a picture of which features are appearing on desktop for those terms and whether any of them are winnable. Local packs, popular products and image carousels all behave differently on desktop than on mobile. Feature targeting strategy needs to account for that.
Finally, revisit your content. If your most commercially important queries are primarily searched on desktop by people in a considered buying process, the content serving those queries should reflect that. Depth, specificity and clear expertise tend to convert better in that context than summary-level information written for a skimmer.
The organic opportunity in B2B search is genuinely strong. The businesses that will make the most of it are the ones willing to look at their own data rather than relying on industry averages that were never really about them. 1968 Limited works with B2B businesses on search strategy, content and digital performance. If you want to understand what your SERP picture looks like on desktop, we can help you find out.