Chapter 17 Exercises — Mobile SEO

Work these in order; they graduate from recall to real diagnosis. Items marked † have worked solutions in the answers appendix. No answers here — struggle first, then check.

How to use these: Do the recall items from memory. For the "diagnose," "audit," and "read the report" items, write out your reasoning as if briefing a client or a developer — the habit of explaining the stage that's broken and the fix is the skill this book is building.

A. Recall and concepts

17.1 † In two or three sentences, define mobile-first indexing in your own words, and name the specific crawler Google predominantly uses to do it.

17.2 True or false, and explain: "Mobile-first indexing means Google keeps a separate mobile index and a separate desktop index, and I optimize each on its own."

17.3 † List the three mobile configurations Google has documented, in one line each, and state which one Google recommends and why.

17.4 Define content parity. Why did mobile-first indexing turn parity from a nice-to-have into a hard prerequisite for ranking?

17.5 † What does the viewport meta tag do, and what specifically goes wrong on a phone when it is missing?

17.6 Define click-to-call and describe (you do not need to write it from scratch) the HTML pattern that makes a phone number tappable.

17.7 Name the four mobile-usability signals from §17.4 and give the "good" state of each in a few words.

B. Applied reasoning

17.8 † Explain, concretely, why a legacy m-dot (m.example.com) site carries a higher content-parity risk than a responsive site. Reference the number of HTML documents involved.

17.9 Give two reasons a page's mobile Core Web Vitals scores tend to be worse than its desktop scores for the identical page.

17.10 A colleague calls click-to-call "an SEO trick to boost rankings." Correct them: what does the tel: fix actually improve, and why is it not a ranking manipulation?

17.11 † A page passes Google's PageSpeed assessment on desktop but fails on mobile. Which of the two is closer to what Google actually assesses for ranking, and why?

17.12 Give two examples of interstitials that would likely count as intrusive (and risk a demotion on mobile search arrival), and two categories that are explicitly excepted.

17.13 † Explain why "you still need AMP to rank on mobile" is outdated. Name the specific Google change that removed AMP's biggest incentive, and what replaced it.

17.14 Responsive design guarantees content parity for free — but it does not guarantee two other things a mobile page needs. Name them, and name the chapter that owns each.

C. Diagnose the page

17.15 † A retailer's mobile product page ranks well below its desktop-strong competitors. On inspection, the mobile HTML contains ~300 words and the desktop HTML ~1,400, plus reviews and FAQ schema that appear on desktop only. Diagnose the problem in pipeline terms and prescribe the fix order.

17.16 † A local HVAC company gets reasonable mobile traffic but the owner says "the phone doesn't ring." Before touching rankings or content, name the mobile-specific things you would check first, and why.

17.17 † A publisher's new mobile theme "de-clutters" articles by loading the author bio, the comments, and half the body text via JavaScript only after the reader taps "Continue reading." What SEO risk did they just introduce, and how would you confirm it?

17.18 A site added a full-screen "Sign up for 10% off!" pop-up that appears the instant a mobile visitor arrives from a Google search, and rankings for those pages slipped. State the most likely cause and the fix — and note the one case where a full-screen overlay on arrival is not a problem.

17.19 A developer argues: "We're mobile-first indexed now, so the desktop version is irrelevant — let's delete the desktop-only specifications table to simplify the codebase." Untangle what's right and wrong in that reasoning.

17.20 † A small business renders its phone number as an image in the site header. Walk through the full cost of this decision for a mobile visitor in an emergency, and give the one-line fix.

D. Audit your own site

(Use free tools. Answers will vary by site; the deliverable is your written finding.)

17.21 † Open your homepage's source (right-click → View Page Source) and search it for viewport. Record whether width=device-width is present. If it is missing, that is your highest-priority mobile fix — say so in one sentence.

17.22 Open a key page in Chrome, toggle device-mode (F12 → device-toolbar) to a phone size, and run a Lighthouse report with "Mobile" selected. List the top three mobile-usability issues it flags.

17.23 † On your actual phone, try to complete your site's single most important action — call, book, or buy — using only one thumb. Time it, and write down every point of friction (mis-taps, zooming, hunting for the number, a pop-up).

17.24 Compare the desktop and mobile versions of one important page. Using URL Inspection's rendered HTML (Chapter 27) or a side-by-side load, identify any content, structured data, image, or link that exists on desktop but is missing from mobile.

E. Read the report / research

17.25 † Re-read Figure 17.2. List exactly which elements are effectively invisible to Google in that example, and put the parity fixes in priority order with a one-line justification for the order.

17.26 Given a "near me" mobile SERP dominated by the local pack (Figure 17.4), state where a local business should focus — and cleanly separate what this chapter owns from what Chapter 25 owns.

17.27 Find one real page (any site) whose phone number is not a tel: link. Describe, step by step, the friction a mobile user must push through to actually place the call.

F. Spot the myth / ethics and risk

17.28 † Spot and correct the myth: "Content hidden behind tabs or accordions is discounted on mobile, so you must show everything expanded." What is the accurate, current version of this rule?

17.29 A vendor pitches Rivertown: "AMP conversion — it's required for mobile rankings — \$6,000, and we guarantee you'll jump to page one." Evaluate every questionable claim in that sentence, and comment on the ethics of the pitch.

G. Strategy File — Rivertown extension

17.30 † Look again at Rivertown's mobile audit (Figure 17.5). Choose the top two fixes by return on effort, justify the order you put them in, and for each one state plainly what it does settle and what it does not settle (which later chapter finishes the job). Add your two-fix recommendation to the running Strategy File.