Mobile Usability Ranking: How Mobile Usability Affects Search Ranking of Your Website

Mobile Usability Ranking (MUR): When it comes to search ranking, webmasters always strive to get most out of their efforts in order to rank better in search engine. There are many ifs and buts, dos and don’ts in search ranking tactics and similarly many factors that could affect your search rankings considerably.

One of those factors is “Mobile Usability” the new Google Console since its inception clearly puts more emphasis on Mobile Usability, there is a whole lot section of “Enhancements” in Google Search Console, these enhancements mainly focus on rich data and mobile usability.

Google announced in 2015 that it will make the mobile-friendliness as a major ranking factor of its core search algorithms, According to SEJ,  Google said, the mobile usability will have a great impact on search ranking.

What is Mobile Usability?

Mobile usability as it sounds is the responsiveness of your website content as it appears on mobile devices when someone visits your website. The website content must resize itself to fit the screen of the user’s device. If your website is fully mobile responsive then you are good.

Errors In Search Console

Webmasters must keep an eye on their search console and continuously monitor and look for any errors that might appear in search console. When you log in to your Google search console you should see the enhancements tab at the bottom, the first item of enhancements tab is the “Mobile Usability” this will show the total number of valid pages on your site and the total number of errors if any.

If you keep changing your website, then it is obvious that you may come across mobile usability errors, and if you do not fix these errors it will seriously damage your search ranking in the short term. This means if you were appearing on the first page for most of the queries you might see a decline and hitting the second page for 2 to 4 months or until the errors are not fixed, in worst case scenario your ranked keywords could entirely disappear from the first few pages.

Yes, you heard that right; I have personally experienced these ranking fluctuations to the couple of domains I was managing. The idea is to keep a close watch over the errors in search console and eliminate them as soon as possible to avoid any incidents. Because once, you have dropped your rank due to these errors it will take you a long time to reclaim your position, so be very careful about the errors.

Fix The Errors and Submit URLs

If you find errors in Mobile Usability report, try to fix them as soon as possible, Google provides details what are the specific errors and how to fix them, if you are not sure how to fix mobile usability errors, talk to your developer for guidance, to check the specific URL and see what problems it has, enter the URL in search console and hit “TEST LIVE URL” it will show real-time issues with the URL. Once you fix all the errors don’t forget to start validation, this will process your errors quicker than Google’s own validation process.