What is Web Core Vitals and why should you focus on improving your website visitor experience?
With the evolution of AI, Google has been changing the way that the algorithm ranks websites pages based on the experience provided to the user. Improving the technical aspects of the website to improve user experience is becoming an important characteristic of a successful digital optimisation strategy.
In June 2021 Google started the global rollout of its new page experience report, and almost 6 months later, a vast majority of websites are still not performing so well and struggling to improve their performance.
Why should you care about web core vitals?
Optimising for this Core Web Vital helps visitors to have a better navigation experience and prevents users from making accidental clicks or getting frustrated because they're taken to a page other than the one they intended to see. Visual stability enhances the user experience and improves your overall SEO performance.
What is the Core Web Vitals?
Google Core Web Vitals is an effort from Google to improve the user search experience. The search engine rolled out new metrics that measure the loading speed, and stability of the page in response to the visitor interactions.
SEO strategies are often focused on sending the right signals to the search engines, but things have been changing and focusing on the user experience should be the main focus of any strategy. You still need to optimise your website pages to get better ranking results but serving the user must be the priority.
For the user, a good experience is to find answers to their questions, have a clear user journey and have good website navigability. In order to take these user metrics into account, Google has created a series of signals to measure the efficiency and effectiveness of a page to decide how to rank the search results and this is how the Core Web Vitals works.
“Core Web Vitals are fundamental metrics to evaluate the experience levels a page offers and is related to the speed and stability in return to the visitor interaction.”
How does that work?
Core web Vitals is a group of essential signals for a good user experience, implemented to Google algorithm to evaluate the website usability. These signals include the following metrics:
- Large Content Paint (LCP) - Measures how fast a page loads
- First Input Delay (FID) - Measures how quickly a user can interact with the page
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) - Measures the page stability during the loading process and how the user interacts with the page
In May 2020, Google has announced that Core Web Vitals would be implemented to the search algorithm.
“Introducing upcoming ranking signals for Google Search based on various aspects of page experience–combining Core Web Vitals and previous UX-related signals.”
Almost one year later, in June 2021, Google announced the global rollout of the update.
“Update on June 15, 2021: The page experience update is rolling out to all users globally. It will be complete by the end of August 2021.”
Further ranking metrics
Google does not use only these metrics to measure the experience of a page in multiple browsers and platforms. Google Core Web Vitals joins other ranking factors previously considered by the algorithm:
- Mobile Experience
- HTTPS protocol
- Non-Intrusive Interactions
Since August 2021 all these signals are used to measure the page experience, combined with hundreds of other ranking factors used by Google search results.
These factors play different roles in the ranking algorithm, and according to Google, a good page experience does not replace high quality and relevant content.
For this reason, is important to take into consideration that pages with better content can rank higher than pages with a better experience. But this can be the difference between being on the first page or not.
Why is important to implement Core Web Vitals to your SEO strategy?
According to Google, when a website follows the guidelines for each metric of the Core Web Vitals, users are 24% less likely to abandon a page.
This can play an important role in your website conversions. Let’s say you have a conversion rate of 2% from 5k daily visits. Only by adjusting the page metrics experience, you can get 24 daily extra conversions.
To improve loading speed and page stability means to create better, faster and uninterrupted user journeys.
It is a win-win process, the users can easily find what they are looking for and your brand improves the relationship with your audience, increase web traffic and conversions.
How to measure your Core Web Vitals Results?
It is important to know that the Core Web Vitals metrics can be measured either with lab data or field data.
That means that Lab Data Metrics are analysed using simulated page loading in a controlled environment. Field Data is created by using real user interactions and it can capture details not available on the Lab Data and it is the parameter used on the Google algorithm.
Are you prepared to measure your performance?
PageSpeed Insights
https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/
How to improve your results?
After testing your website performance and finding out the results it’s time to make some adjustments.
The recommendations provided by the tool are usually technical and require a good level of understanding to apply the changes to the website.
Things like loading speed can be drastically improved by choosing the right hosting service. (Do you know that we offer managed hosting services, get in touch to discover how we can help you improve your results.)
Each website may require a custom optimisation plan that can be created in conjunction with your SEO strategy in order to maximise your results.
Get in touch with us for an SEO consultation, email us at [email protected].
