Google Adds Mobile Usability Reports To Its Webmaster Tools

Google has announced a new feature in its Webmaster Tools to allow the tracking of mobile usability issues. Improving the mobile experience for users is a hot topic among marketers, and Google’s new Mobile Usability Report is likely to be a valuable asset in this endeavor.

The new tool will provide a report illustrating common usability issues with your mobile site to better allow you to fix and improve the mobile experience for all users across all devices. Marketers are well aware of the fact that the lack of a positive mobile experience can be detrimental to the success of a business, and with the wide variety of device types and screen sizes, optimizing a site to work well on all devices is a challenge. The hope for this new tool is that it will assist businesses with meeting this demand.

“Mobile is growing at a fantastic pace – in usage, not just in screen size,” Google wrote in its blog post. “To keep you informed of issues mobile users might be seeing across your website, we’ve added the Mobile Usability feature to Webmaster Tools. The new feature shows mobile usability issues we’ve identified across your website, complete with graphs over time so that you see the progress that you’ve made.”

Some of the specific errors that the new report will show are flash content, missing viewport meta-tag for mobile pages, small fonts that are difficult to read on mobile, fixed-width viewports, content not sized to viewport, and clickable links/buttons that are situated too close to each other to be easily used.

“A mobile-friendly site is one that you can easily read and use on a smartphone, by only having to scroll up or down,” Google explained. “Swiping left/right to search for content, zooming to read text and use UI elements, or not being able to see the content at all make a site harder to use for users on mobile phones.”

Google included the following screen shot of a sample report in its blog post.

John Mueller, Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google, suggests in the blog post that there is great value in taking a close look at these issues by utilizing the new reporting tool. Mobile traffic represents an increasingly large percentage of overall traffic, so implementing the suggestions provided in the report could be a great way to increase the positivity of your customer’s experience.