Core Web Vitals – do you need to worry?

Hello, and thanks for listening to SEO tips today.

First of all. Core Web Vitals. Will it impact you?

At the moment, it’s a tiny ranking factor. But it depends on your business goals, the vertical in which you operate, and your web search competitors, the impact on your business could be significant.

Ultimately I would recommend that everyone look at where they stand today by reviewing your Google Search Console Core Web Vitals report. If the vast majority of your pages are considered slow in this report, then most likely there is something fundamental on your website that is not working and you should make fixing those issues a priority. 

But what if your pages are somewhat slow, but your content is high quality?

Here’s what Google says on the matter:

“While all of the components of page experience are important, we will prioritize pages with the best information overall, even if some aspects of page experience are subpar. A good page experience doesn’t override having great, relevant content. However, in cases where there are multiple pages that have similar content, page experience becomes much more important for visibility in Search.”– Google Webmaster Central Blog, 28 May 2020

So here’s the takeaway:

Good content pages will rank well despite having a bad page experience signal.

There is a lot we don’t know yet about Core Web Vitals metrics will be used.

1. The Google web search team has not stated how the metrics will be used. Your pages are graded based on these three categories: Poor, Needs improvement, or Good and we don’t know if a “poor” will make your page low quality and directly be a ranking factor.
2. We don’t know if it will be site-wide or a page level signal.
3. We don’t know if the data will be segmented by the user location or the user’s network speed. 

Here’s how to think through regularly measuring these metrics on your site:

1. The data that is collected is real-time data and updated once a month.
2. Once you set up these metrics inside your Google Analytics by using GTM, you can then segment the data based on user type or page type.
3. Inside your GA you can then link it to conversions so that you can measure your own impact speed and UX has on your conversions.

So that’s your tip for today. Add Web Vitals metrics to your Google Analytics and start tracking your site’s performance. 

Thanks for listening. Come back tomorrow for another SEO tip.

Listen to the previous episode: Federal .gov websites need SEO

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