In today’s mobile-driven world, making sure your website offers a seamless mobile experience is paramount. With mobile devices accounting for a significant portion of global web traffic, any usability issues can have a negative impact on the performance of your site, user engagement, and search engine rankings. Thankfully, Google Search Console, or GSC, is an incredibly powerful free tool that can help you identify and resolve mobile usability issues. In this post, we’ll show you how to use Google Search Console to find mobile usability issues, understand the data, and take action to improve your mobile experience.
Why Mobile Usability Matters
Before diving into the technicalities, let’s discuss why mobile usability is so important:
Mobile-First Indexing: Primarily, Google indexes the mobile version of your website and uses it for ranking. A poor mobile experience can directly hit your organic search visibility.
UX: As far as the use of mobile devices to access websites is concerned, the promise is a seamless, responsive, and fast-loading website. Bad usability means greater bounce rates and fewer conversions.
SEO Rankings: Google uses mobile usability as one of the ranking factors. Websites with continuous mobile usability have a greater possibility of ranking better in search results.
Google Search Console is your go-to tool for analyzing and fixing mobile usability issues. Now, let’s take a closer look at each step of the process.
Step 1: Accessing the Mobile Usability Report in Google Search Console
The first step in identifying usability issues is locating the Mobile Usability Report in GSC. Access it with the following steps:
Log in to the Google Search Console: Open the Google Search Console and log in with your credentials.
Select Property: From the dashboard, select the website property you want to analyze.
Go to Mobile Usability: Click on Mobile Usability under the “Experience” section of the left-hand menu.
This is a high-level report showing the mobile usability issues that were found on your site by Google’s crawler.
Step 2: Understanding the Mobile Usability Report
Once you access your Mobile Usability Report, you will be shown a summary of the issues facing your site. Here’s what each section means:
1.) Error Status: Google indicates whether the page has either “Valid” issues-which don’t have problems-or “Error” issues that do. Focus on pages highlighted under “Error”.
2.) Issue Types: The following are some mobile usability issues highlighted in the report:
Clickable elements too close together: Links, buttons, or other interactive elements are placed so close that users cannot comfortably tap them.
Text too small to read: Font sizes are very small, and zooming is needed to read the content.
Viewport not set: The meta tag for the viewport is either missing or has been wrongly set up-hence pages are not rendering properly on mobile devices.
Content wider than screen: Page content is wider than the screen of the mobile device, which causes horizontal scrolling of pages.
Uses incompatible plugins: Webpage uses obsolete technologies like Flash, which does not work on most mobile devices.
3.) Affected Pages: Report lists specific URLs where the above issues are seen.
Step 3: Prioritizing Issues
After identifying the problems, prioritize them based on their potential impact on user experience and SEO. To prioritize:
High Priority Issues: Issues like “Viewport not set” or “Content wider than screen” should be fixed right away because it causes the most impact on disrupting the mobile user experience.
Medium Priority Issues: This includes issues like “Clickable elements too close together” or “Text too small to read”. It might not block usability but can surely frustrate the users and lead to bounces.
Low Priority Issues: “Uses incompatible plugins” is lower priority because most modern browsers block Flash, but it’s still good to address.
Step 4: Diagnosing and Fixing Common Mobile Usability Issues
Following are some of the most common mobile usability issues detected in GSC and their respective fixes:
1.) Clickable Elements Too Close Together Problem: Buttons, links, or interactive elements are too close; it’s really difficult for users to tap without accidentally clicking on an element that they did not intend to click.
Solution: Increase spacing between clickable elements using CSS. Make sure buttons and links have enough padding, and that they are at least 48px apart.
2.) Text Too Small to Read
Problem: Font sizes too small make it hard to read; user needs to zoom in.
Solution: Set body text at least 16px, with use of responsive CSS that dynamically updates font size upon the current size of the screen.
3.) Viewport Not Set
Problem: Pages are not correctly shown on mobile phones due to un-set or badly set Viewport meta tag
Solution: Set the following meta tag within HTML <head>:
<meta name=”viewport” content=”width=device-width, initial-scale=1″>
This will ensure that your content scales properly for all screen sizes.
4.) Content Wider than Screen
Problem: Content extends beyond the width of the screen and horizontal scrolling is experienced.
Solution: Use responsive design so that your content fits within the screen display. Make images and videos take percentage values in width instead of fixed pixel values, for example width: 100%.
5.) Uses Incompatible Plugins
Problem: Older technologies, such as Flash, are in use that are unsupported on most mobile browsers.
Solution: Replace Flash-based content with modern alternatives like HTML5.
Step 5: Testing Fixes
After addressing the issues, test your fixes to ensure they work correctly. Here’s how:
Use Google Search Console’s Validation Tool: After fixing the problem, revisit the Mobile Usability Report in GSC and click “Validate Fix” for that specific issue. Google will recrawl the page to confirm the fix.
Mobile-Friendly Test: Check if your website is optimized for mobile using Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test.
Performance Testing Tools: Utilize tools like PageSpeed Insights or Lighthouse to assess how your fixes affect performance and usability.
Step 6: Monitor Mobile Usability Regularly
Mobile usability is not one-off. Your site constantly changes, and new issues come up. To stay ahead:
Schedule Regular Audits: Go back to GSC periodically to check the Mobile Usability Report for new issues.
Follow Changes in Traffic and Engagement: Google Analytics will track mobile traffic and engagement metrics; a sudden fall may indicate new usability issues.
Keep Up with Google’s Guidelines: Google constantly updates its mobile-first indexing and usability recommendations. Follow their Search Central Blog to stay updated.
Why Google Search Console is the Best Tool for Mobile Usability
Google Search Console is an excellent avenue to find and fix mobile usability issues since it provides:
Real-time Insights: GSC actively scans your website and reports on emerging usability problems.
Search-Specific Data: The tool’s insights are directly connected to Google’s search engine, ensuring your fixes are in line with SEO best practices.
Free Access: While many other tools are paid for, GSC is absolutely free, thus accessible for businesses of all sizes.
Conclusion
In today’s world, which belongs to mobile phones, the optimization of your website for mobile usability is no more an option but a compulsion. Google Search Console allows one to quickly diagnose and fix many mobile usability problems that are undermining both user experiences and SEO performances. GSC makes it simpler to diagnose a wide range of issues, including “text too small to read” and “clickable elements too close together,” in ensuring that your site is mobile-friendly.
It should be noted, mobile usability is not a one-time task. Continuously monitor your Mobile Usability Report, test your fixes with tools like Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test, and stay up-to-date with best practices. This will give your users a far better experience and make your website prepared for successful search rankings in the long run.
Reach out if you have any questions.
