Suppose you wake up one fine day, go through the morning routines, open up your phone, and see that Google has introduced another update. It would be no surprise. We all know how much Google does introduce updates. But a few times, it reveals updates big enough to change how SEO used to work. There was that Florida update, Vince update, Mayday-Mayday, Panda, Penguin, Humming, and what not! It is not new, but it is very vital. SEO guides the internet, and a change in that changes the way this digital world works. People losing their websites’ rankings after an update is not some novelty. Google analyzes the internet, takes feedback, and tries to improve to provide a better user experience. It has been some time when Google had revealed its intent to improve the user experience. Core Web Vitals is the latest addition to this same. Leading SEO services company, Sydney, Australia are already adapting to this newest addition due to its huge impact on the SERP rankings. So what is this thing called Core Web Vitals?
The user’s journey: tale of a netizen.
Google, when introduced this factor, gave an analogy of a person walking through an unfamiliar city. The analogy was: Suppose you are walking through a strange city to attend an important appointment. You walk through the streets, but the way throws hurdles at you, the gates are rusty, the elevators slow, and a surprise construction pushes you astray at last — how would you rate your day? Probably a day you would not want to happen again. This, says Google, is what happens to users visiting websites. They suffer due to the issues at the developer’s end. There are websites that take four hours to load, then it loads incorrectly, foul popups vex thereafter, and when the page loads as desired at last the user forgets what s/he was there for! This lead Google to take few factors into consideration.
Core Web Vitals is nothing but a blend of three factors that decide the quality of User Experience (UX). These three factors are:
- Loading Speed: how fast a page loads up before the user;
- Interactiveness: How fast does it starts interacting with the user;
- Stability: how stable the page stays thereafter.
These vitals are then taken into account and combined with other factors. This combination is called the Page Experience Ranking Factors. These other factors include mobile friendliness, safe browsing (malware or other viruses), HTTPS, and compliance with their intrusive interstitial guidelines.
If you keep yourself in the foot that owns the website, you might not like this change. But if you step into the boot of this user and walk this strange city for your appointment, you might sigh off and curse this internet world. Google does not want it. The Internet is currently new for people to get adapted to, and Google is trying to make things work the right way. As per Blurn, the best SEO agency (Sydney) would always focus on quality.
The one thing to notice is that when Google judges the page’s ability to provide a user experience, it only adjusts the ranking for the medium that page is displayed on. For e.g., if a page is creating issues over laptops and not mobiles, then the ranking would be adjusted for laptops alone.
How could Core Web Vitals affect your SEO and SERP ranking?
The answer is simple: If google analyzes your website as being unfavorable to an overall user experience, it will rank you down.
These three vitals have been defined by Google as follows:
LCP or Largest Contentful Paint:
It looks at the time taken by the page’s main content to load. Users expect a page to load up within 2 to 3 seconds. This makes a time under 2.5 seconds ideal as per LCP measurement. There are things you can do about it. If you have hired the leading SEO services company (Sydney, Australia) then you need not to worry. But if you handle things individually, then make sure there are not too many elements in your page. Avoid a website builder. A website builder uses 4 times the elements that do usually take to form a page. This slows down the speed. Compress your media for faster loading. Optimize the content and take care of any technical errors which are there. You might want to visit the Google Search Console and look for any issues. A slower loading speed leads to a lower user retention rate and an increased bounce rate.
First Input Delay:
This aims at improving the user experience when they try to interact with your website. Suppose you enter a shopping website, you see that wonderful red romper, and then you try to add it to your cart, but nothing happens. This makes you click on the add to cart button again, and there you unintentionally add two rompers. This was caused by a delayed response on the add-to-cart button. Google recommends keeping this delay under 100ms to be fair. If your take-action buttons are really taking time in taking actions, then you need to take actions instead. If you do not know how to check it, hire some leading SEO services company (Sydney Australia).
Cumulative Layout Shift:
How many times have you frowned when you start reading a page, get a little further, and a new page element loads up, takes its space, displaces the content before you, and leads you astray? We then try scrolling and look for the exact word we were at while reading. This leads to a negative user experience and people less likely prefer such websites.
This, at other times, can lead to wrong clicks. We try clicking something, a new element adds up and disrupts the alignment, and we end up clicking something else. Google recommends keeping these unexpected shifts to be under 0.1% for 75% of the pages. This is the work of web developers. If you are unaware of these technicalities, then it is recommended not to touch these sensitive things.
There are free tools made available by Google to check these factors alongside those other factors that Google uses in combination with these three core web vitals. Consider learning how to use the search console and various webmaster’s tools. Says Blurn, the best SEO agency (Sydney) might cost you some, but if your vision is to go long, it is advisable to go for SEO services. It pays back.