Web Core Vitals – how much of an impact is it going to have?
Hello. Thanks for listening to SEO tips today.
First: Google has said that the page experience update won’t be a considerable change initially.
This announcement is reassuring for those of us still working on improving our sites. John Mueller from Google also downplays the impact on ranking in this SEO Office Hours.
Second: The rollout date has changed.
The rollout is going to happen gradually in mid-June and being fully live by August of this year.
Third: Google updated their FAQs and has added a new Page Experience report in Google Search Console.
The updated FAQs are worth scanning to understand how the upcoming algorithm update might impact you. The big takeaway is that Google will still rank the most relevant content regardless of how poorly the core web vitals score is.
Here’s the quote:
“A good page experience doesn’t override having great, relevant content,” Google wrote.
And neither AMP nor web core vitals are a deciding factor for the top stories part of the search result pages.
Related to the Google Search Console report, it’s not for every page on your site but instead is a sample based on various page types. This data is focused on the idea that if you improve the technical issues on those page types/templates, you’ll fix a more extensive set of pages.
Fourth: For e-commerce, you might not see a ranking boost.
BrightEdge’s study found that “most sites in the B2B niche would probably not receive a ranking boost. Unfortunately, they only looked at four industries.
Fifth: Many websites are not ready. Only 4% have good scores.
Yup. That’s the result of a Searchmetrics study. Most had issues with Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) – items shifted as they loaded, which, BTW, is also horrible for website accessibility in general. Also, not surprisingly, many sites loaded slowly due to unused JS that is slowing them down. And finally, most websites had issues with poorly optimized images and videos.
OK. So here are my tips regarding Core Web Vitals.
If you need to predict the ROI of working on Core Web Vitals improvements?
- Here’s a UX Speed calculator that could help
- Also, Tim Vereeck fashioned this frustration index, where you can easily calculate the frustration levels of your website.
I recommend everyone set up tracking for these metrics. I’m a fan of pushing the data via GTM to your Google Analytics to measure that way, but now Google is showing the information in Google Search Console. You can also use that data to start prioritizing fixes.
And remember: you’re fixing this issue both for a Google ranking impact and ensuring that one in four adults in the US with a disability can use your site.
To improve your speed performance, here are a few odd tips that might help:
One: If you use the Content-visibility CSS property can boost your rendering performance. Read more about that at https://web.dev/content-visibility/.
Two: You should use a screenshot instead of a Twitter embed: https://twitter.com/azarchick/status/1373033133554171905.
Finally: If you think your site has issues with your CLS score, Google has provided tips at https://web.dev/debug-layout-shifts/.
Thanks for listening. Come back tomorrow for another SEO tip.
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