Before discussing Core Web Vitals, we must establish what Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is.
What Is Search Engine Optimization?
SEO is a strategic technique commonly employed by marketers to gain more visibility and increase the presence of an online website or webpage. This means that your website will show up at the top of the search result when internet users key in the right keywords. Having a high SEO ranking means that your company can get more views, clicks, and conversions!
SEO itself was already a thing around the late 1990s. Who knew that SEO would become one of the marketing essentials today? However, due to the rapid development and innovation which the technology and digital sector undergo, SEO standards are ever-changing. Search engines are always updating and improving their algorithms to provide a better user experience.
To achieve excellent SEO in the past, all you needed were a few targeted keywords incorporated on your website. But today, we need much more than that to gain steady organic traffic from the Internet. One particular recent development in the SEO industry is the introduction of Core Web Vitals by Google.
Next, we’ll be going in-depth on this new update, and how it should change your SEO technique.
What is Core Web Vitals and how does it work?
Core Web Vitals, or simply Web Vitals, is a program introduced by Google as the new approach to SEO. Moving on from targeted keywords and backlinks, Google announced that Web Vitals is going to focus and prioritize user experience (UX). It consists of three factors that are used to determine the rank of your site:
- Largest Contentful Paint (Loading)
- First Input Delay (Interactivity)
- Cumulative Layout Shift (Visual Stability)
Largest Contentful Paint
Large Contentful Paint (LCP) measures how fast your website and its main content are loaded from the moment someone clicks on your website link. Google’s standards indicate that any website which loads less than 2.5 seconds hits the mark.
Although Google can sound pretty demanding, LCP measurements actually help your website too! With the average person’s attention span shorter than that of a goldfish, you won’t want impatient viewers clicking away too quickly. With LCP, you can better understand the loading speeds of your webpages, and how you can improve them!
First Input Delay
First Input Delay (FID) measures how fast your website becomes interactive to anyone who visits your site. According to Google, a good website would be interactive at 100ms or less.
Making your website interactive isn’t just about having stunning user interfaces. In fact, it’s more about communicating to your viewers through the website. Integrating a chatbot, pop-up notifications, and even engaging games count as interactivity!
Cumulative Layout Shift
Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) emphasizes visual stability, where Google measures how complete the elements of your webpage load. For instance, if the blocks on your webpage load in chunks and one by one, that would incur a bad ranking as it is considered to have low visual stability. Google considers anything less than or equivalent to 0.1 to be good.
In essence, Google looks at how the layout of your webpage shifts unexpectedly. This can be minor formatting errors, or costly mistakes which jumbles up your site’s content. Some common culprits are unformatted images and code-heavy embeds, so keep an eye out for them!
By using these metrics, Google can accurately assign each website to its corresponding ranking. If you want to get a higher ranking and be seen by more internet users, these three aspects are crucial to your SEO strategy.
What is the purpose of Core Web Vitals?
The main reason why Google decided to introduce the Web Vitals program is to simplify the process.
Basically, any website developer, owner, and marketer can easily improve their SEO ranking by enhancing the users’ experience. In Google’s words, they envisioned Web Vitals to be a “unified guidance – essential to delivering a great user experience on the web”.
Previously, there was an overwhelming number of tools and guidelines made available to consumers for SEO. Well, you only need to know the 3 criteria of Web Core Vitals (LCP, FID, CLS).
With this simplicity, beginners and professionals alike can obtain a higher ranking for their websites by harnessing these three metrics. As such, Google makes it clear what they want from websites, in turn offering coveted spots on the search engine’s home page.
In this most recent update, it seems that Google is prioritizing user experience above all else.
What are the implications of Core Web Vitals?
According to recent data, only the top two or three ranking sites are capable of meeting the requirements imposed by Web Vitals. This also suggests that some 96% of websites on the Internet fail to be fit within Google’s expectations of a “good” website.
Furthermore, research conducted by Searchmetrics, which measured up to two million sites across United States, United Kingdom, and Germany, reached similar conclusions. Their results demonstrated that there was a strong, positive relationship between high-ranking sites and sites that fulfill the requirements of the Web Vitals’ metrics.
Hence, it is evident that Google’s Web Vitals program is not easy to satisfy or game. It’s extremely important to both existing and future website owners. After all, the top spots on Google’s front page are only reserved for those who meet the three metrics of Web Vitals.
Another perspective to view the implementation of Web Vitals is to acknowledge the ultimate goal of Google: to prioritize their users’ experience. By introducing these regulations of having website owners enhance and improve their site’s UX, Google is heading in the right direction.
One day, the top websites will not show spammy and disorganized content. Instead, viewers will be guaranteed a smooth, streamlined, and uninterrupted experience.
The New Game Plan
The Core Web Vitals is an initiative taken by Google in an attempt to reform the current complex and disorderly SEO guidelines. By offering more simplified guidance, Google hopes that more webpage developers and owners will improve the UX of their website.
A website that fully utilizes and leverages Web Vitals’ criteria will stand the largest chance of getting a high SEO rank on the Google search engine. So, what’s the new game plan?
You should definitely start putting more attention on your website’s user interface! Keep the three metrics of Web Vitals in mind, with a solid focus on how your website looks to others.
Before you get too invested in improving the UX of your website, don’t forget that the previous SEO criteria are still relevant, and should be adhered to!
Outro
In conclusion, Web Vitals certainly is one of the more important upcoming guidelines to comply with. If there’s one thing to take away from this article, Web Core Vitals is the new SEO strategy – which you need.
If you can complement traditional techniques with an amazing user experience, your website will shoot to the top of Google’s front page in no time! Reach out to us here at Minerva for assistance in reaching the top.