Technical SEO

Mobile Usability

Quick Definition

Mobile usability is the bundle of design and technical signals — viewport configuration, tap target size, font legibility, content fitting the screen — that determine whether a page is usable on a phone.

In context

Google retired the dedicated Mobile Usability report in Search Console in late 2023 (after Core Web Vitals + manual audits superseded it) but mobile usability remains a real, evaluable quality signal. Modern checks: viewport meta tag set correctly, tap targets ≥48×48 CSS pixels, font sizes ≥16px for body text, no horizontal scrolling, no intrusive interstitials. Mobile-first indexing has been the default for years — every audit must start from a mobile rendering.

Example

A Toronto restaurant's reservation page was failing on mobile because the 'Book Now' button overlapped the date picker on screens under 360px wide — fixing the touch targets recovered an estimated 30% of mobile bookings.

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Related terms

INP (Interaction to Next Paint)

INP measures responsiveness to user interactions like clicks and taps. The 'good' threshold is under 200 milliseconds.

robots.txt

robots.txt is a file at yoursite.com/robots.txt that tells search engine crawlers which URLs they can and cannot fetch. It controls crawling, not indexing.

Redirect Loop

A redirect loop occurs when URL A redirects to URL B, which redirects back to URL A — creating an infinite cycle.

302 Redirect

A 302 redirect is a temporary redirect that tells search engines the move is not permanent.

SSR (Server-Side Rendering)

SSR generates HTML on the server before sending it to the browser, ensuring search engines see complete content immediately.

Orphan Page

An orphan page is a page on your site with no internal links pointing to it. Orphan pages are difficult for Google to discover and tend to rank poorly.

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