Following on from our last blog Google’s New Core Web Vitals & Why Your Business Should Learn Them Now as far as SEO is concerned, it is both good news and bad news.
It’s good news for the businesses that have always prioritised the user experience. After all, the Core Web Vitals is all about the “page experience.” It analyses your page speed, stability, and interactivity when deciding how to rank websites. We can say that the Google Ranking Algorithm has received a major upgrade, making it smarter and better.
But again, on the one hand, it’s going to be bad news for a lot of websites and products that have been abusing the previous Google PageRank Algorithm. According to a recent study, more than 70% of all websites will be affected by this ranking and will be ranked significantly lower.
And so here we are right now, at a turning point in the history of Google algorithms.
The best news is: you’re here. And that means you want to do better with your website. And when it comes to the new Google ranking system, “improving user experience” is the key to success, and we’re here to help you. And if you want to improve your SEO and Core Web Vital scores, here are our tips.
Understanding The Page Experience Signal
Before anything else, let’s do a recap. For some time now, Google’s algorithm has included a Page Experience Signal. As technology advances, it is constantly updated. The existing set of factors are known as “search signals,” and these include:
Mobile-friendliness: Does your website look good and fully functional on mobile devices?
Security: Is your website free of malicious code, deceptive pages, or other security issues?
HTTPS Security: Do you use an SSL certificate to protect your users’ sensitive data over HTTPS?
Pop-ups and other intrusive interstitials: Is your site obscuring content and experience with these features?
A user’s experience on a website is important to Google because it does not want to recommend dangerous or confusing sites to visitors. The user may not trust Google’s recommendations if they have a bad experience with a site that Google recommends to them.
The Core Web Vitals Elements
So now here’s where the Core Web Vitals Elements come in. Google announced that it will add Core Web Vitals to the Page Experience Signal to help “site owners measure user experience on the web.” We’ve also discussed them more deeply in a previous article here.
Core Web Vitals are a set of metrics that track load time, interactivity, and stability of content, which include:
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) – how long a page takes to load
- First Input Delay (FID) – how long it takes the user to interact with your page
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) – the visual stability of the page
How To Measure Core Web Vitals
Google provides a variety of tools to assist site administrators and developers in optimising their websites. Using different tools to measure and assess various aspects of a page’s user experience can be difficult and frustrating. That’s why Google launched the Web Vitals Initiative to streamline these metrics in most of its products. Core Web Vitals can now be accessed by anyone, not just developers, thanks to the wide availability of these metrics across a variety of tools. You can access these metrics here:
- Chrome User Experience Report
- PageSpeed Insights
- Search Console
- Web Vitals Chrome Extension
- Chrome Dev Tools and Lighthouse.
While there is no single tool that will check the Page Experience Signal in its entirety at the moment, consolidating the Core Web Vitals in one location is a good start. Additionally, Google is exploring ways to integrate Core Web Vitals into third-party tools.
What Can We Do To Raise Our Google Core Web Vitals Score?
Even though other search engines have evolved, Google’s fundamental principle has remained the same.
If you want to optimise your website for Google, you need to know why Google exists in the first place. The purpose of Google is to give people what they need when they need it.
So, in this case, there are two main components:
First, you need to fully comprehend the motivations behind users’ searches (not just what they type into the search box). Then secondly, you need to determine which search results should appear first, or, in other words, “who” among many similar sources has the correct answer. Or, in your case, it should be YOU who has the correct answer (at least for Google’s algorithm to recognise you and reward you with a higher rank.)
These two are the two pillars of SEO and Google’s new Core Web Vital strategy. The more you know about these two, the better you’ll be at search engine optimisation this 2021 and in the years to come.
Because Google wants to show the most relevant results first, don’t resort to cheap tricks or dirty hacks to get around this. Any attempt to deceive Google will not only be futile but will also result in your website being flagged and eventually getting blocked.
The first step in great SEO in the modern age is really easy and astonishingly straightforward: Give people what they want and what they need!
Click here for BoomNow to provide a free SEO Report. This report we run is easy to read and understand and shows important factors such as on-page SEO optimization, off-page backlinks, social, performance, security, and more.
