Google recently released a new ranking algorithm designed to judge web pages based on how users perceive the experience of interacting with a web page. That means if Google thinks your website users will have a poor experience on your pages, Google may not rank those pages as high as they are now.

This update is called the Google Page Experience update or Core Web Vitals update and is not expected to go live until sometime in 2021, so you have plenty of time to prepare. Before this new ranking algorithm takes effect in 2021, it is important for you to have full information on how to take advantage of it. This article will address it using the following points.

• What is page experience?
• What Are Core Web Vitals
• Getting Ready For The Update
• 6 Ways to Measure Google’s Core Web Vitals
• 7 Ways Google User Page Experience Can Drive Your Business Profit in 2021
• What To Do When Google Updates Its Algorithm

What is page experience? 

Google has a detailed developer document on the page experience criteria but in short, these metrics aim to understand how a user will perceive the experience of a specific web page: considerations such as whether the page loads quickly, if it’s mobile-friendly, runs on HTTPS, the presence of intrusive ads and if content jumps around as the page loads.

Page experience is made up of several existing Google search ranking factors, including the mobile-friendly update, Page Speed Update, the HTTPS ranking boost, the intrusive interstitials penalty, safe browsing penalty, while refining metrics around speed and usability. These refinements are under what Google calls Core Web Vitals.

It is also important to note that while page experience is important, Google still seeks to rank pages with the best information overall, even if the page experience is subpar. Great page experience doesn’t override having great page content. However, in cases where there are many pages that may be similar in relevance, page experience can be much more important for visibility in Search.

What Are Core Web Vitals

Core Web Vitals include real-world, user-centered metrics, that give scores on aspects of your pages including load time, interactivity, and the stability of content as it loads. These metrics fall under these metrics:

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): measures loading performance. To provide good user experience, LCP should occur within 2.5 seconds of when the page first starts loading.
• First Input Delay (FID): measures interactivity. To provide good user experience, pages should have an FID of less than 100 milliseconds.
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): measures visual stability. To provide good user experience, pages should maintain a CLS of less than 0.1.

When you group these all together, you get this page experience name for all these elements. Google said page experience specifically is not a ranking score, but rather, each element within has its own weights and rankings in the overall Google ranking algorithm.

What are all these factors. We linked to most of them above, but here is how Google documents each individual factor within page experience:

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): Measures loading performance. To provide good user experience, sites should strive to have LCP occur within the first 2.5 seconds of the page starting to load.
• First Input Delay (FID): Measures interactivity. To provide good user experience, sites should strive to have an FID of less than 100 milliseconds.
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): Measures visual stability. To provide good user experience, sites should strive to have a CLS score of less than 0.1.
• Mobile-Friendly. The page is mobile-friendly. Check if your page is mobile-friendly with the Mobile-Friendly Test.
• Safe browsing. The page doesn’t contain malicious (for example, malware) or deceptive (for example, social engineering) content.
• HTTPS. The page is served over HTTPS
• No intrusive interstitials. The content on the page is easily accessible to the user.

Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS). This is a new metric that basically looks at if the page is stable when it loads (i.e., do images, content, buttons move around the page as the page loads or does the page stay put and solid). In short, is the layout of the page shifting, resulting in a poor user experience. Google shared a GIF of this in action:

Getting Ready For The Update

This will go live sometime in 2021, Google promised to give six-months notice before it goes live. Google is giving us time, not just because Google normally gives us a heads up to prepare for these updates, but also because of the unstable environment, we are all living through during this pandemic. We will update you all when Google announces a date for the release of this update.

You can prepare now for all of these ranking changes with the tools listed above. You can also use the new Core Web Vitals report in Google Search Console

How big of an update will this be? 

We have heard from Google about previous Google updates, how some like Panda’s initial released impacted 11.8% of all queries, or Google BERT impacted 10% of queries, or that HTTPS is a small factor. But with this update, we don’t know yet. However, below are some things we know.

Great content is still supreme. Google made it clear that great content will still rank highly in Google Search, despite a poor page experience. “While all of the components of page experience are important, we will rank 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 wrote.

Top Stories. As we covered in our AMP won’t be required for Google’s Top Stories section, AMP is no longer required for inclusion in the Top Stories section in the mobile Google search results. What will matter is that Google will look at the page experience scores and this will play a vital role in what content shows in Google’s Top Stories section, Rudy Galfi told us.

AMP. AMP will still surface in the Google mobile search results if you have AMP pages. That is not changing, but what is changing is that now your AMP pages will compete with other pages for the Top Stories section in Google.

If you have AMP, the good news is that the majority of AMP pages do extremely well in terms of page experience metrics, Rudy Galfi said. It doesn’t mean that all AMP pages will have top page experience metrics, but AMP is built in a way to help with this.

Google on mobile will use the page experience metrics from your AMP content. Since Google serves AMP pages on mobile, if you have an AMP version of your page, then Google will use the AMP page experience metrics for scoring purposes. Again, it is what Google serves to the user that will be judged for ranking.

6 Ways to Measure Google’s Core Web Vitals

PageSpeed Insights

PageSpeed Insights has been upgraded to use Lighthouse 6.0, which makes it capable of measuring Core Web Vitals in both the lab and field sections of the report.

From the image below, you can see that the metrics which have a blue ribbon to their right are Core Web Vitals metrics. They can be seen in both “Field Data” and “Lab Data” sections.

Chrome UX Report

Also referred to as CrUX, this report is a public dataset of real user experience data on millions of websites.

The Chrome UX report measures field versions of all the Core Web Vitals, which means it reports on real-world data rather than lab data.

Google has recently updated the report with a new Core Web Vitals landing page.

Search Console

The Google Search Console has been updated and now shows the Core Web Vitals metrics under the “Enhancements” section. This new report evaluates the pages on your website and segregates them into ‘Poor’,’Need Improvement’ and ‘Good’. The Core Web Vitals report in Search Console is based on the real-time data taken from CrUX report. 

Chrome DevTools

Chrome DevTools has been updated to help site owners find and fix visual instability issues on a page that can contribute to Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS).

In addition, Chrome DevTools also measures Total Blocking Time (TBT), which is useful when it ones to improving First Input Delay (FID).

Lighthouse Report

The Lighthouse Report is a helpful tool to analyse your Page Speed and SEO performance. The new update V6 brings new features that can help you measure Google’s Core Web Vitals. The two metrics that can help you in this are – Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS). TBT(Total Blocking Time) is another metric available in the Lighthouse report which can help you improve your FID (First Input Delay).

Web Vitals Extension

There’s also a new Chrome plugin that you can download to view a website’s Core Web Vitals metrics.

Open the website whose Core Web Vitals metrics you want to check. Now click on the “Core Web Vitals” extension and it will show you the three most important metrics – LCP(Largest Contentful Paint), FID(First Input Delay) and CLS(Cumulative Layout Shift). This extension will help you study the metrics of your competitors.

7 Ways Google User Page Experience Can Drive Your Business Profit in 2021

Google User experience and professional web design are core elements crucial to winning customers online and boosting profits. With the demands of a data-driven market economy, developing an impressive website design is instrumental in creating a more accessible user experience. The union of these two elements is essential in achieving better conversion rates and ultimately paves the way to boost your profits.

A website that is properly optimized with Google’s User Page Experience can drive revenue for your business. Even if you’re not an ecommerce brand shipping widgets to buyers, your website should be more than a digital brochure.

Your website needs to be a revenue machine.

Views, leads, subscribers, opportunities, and sales should all come from your website. If you’re not tracking sales and adding to your bottom line the website is just a hobby. And probably an expensive hobby.

How can a website with Google User Page Experience drive revenue for your business? Here are 7 ways your site can generate cash flow.

Increased Lead Conversions

It is important to capture your potential customers’ attention the first time they approach your storefront. Making that first impression is your first major step towards earning a buying customer.

When it comes to virtual merchandising, your website functions as your storefront⁠. Unlike a physical one, your website can be accessed by almost anyone, anytime, anywhere⁠. Its omnipresence plays a major influence on how your potential and existing clients perceive your business.

Here are a few benefits you can have with a well-designed website with Google User Experience:

• Setting up a seamless and accessible website sends a signal to your customers that you prioritize their needs on top of everything.
• An organized, responsive, and user-friendly website tells your potential customers that your business is not just a money-making entity but a service provider.
• From your website’s domain down to your product categorization and check out tab, a customer can assume whether your business is reputable or not. Thus, it’s crucial to ensure the smooth flow of their buying experience to increase the chances of making them loyal customers.

Whether it’s a completely new website or a website redesign, optimizing with Google User Experience for lead conversions is an important step. If no viewers ever turn into leads, you won’t generate revenue.

By converting those who find your website into leads, you’re filling your marketing and sales buckets and driving business to the appropriate teams.

Does your homepage have a call to action to do business with your brand? This could be “buy now,” “schedule a consultation,” or “get a demo.” Some way you can help your ideal clients take the final step as soon as they find you will help those ready-to-go customers.

Other conversion opportunities will include:

• Beginning of the journey offers like a free guide
• Join the community
• Sign up for our newsletter with exclusive content and deals
• Contextual calls-to-action for your buyer personas
• Use case stories that speak to your personas

Conversion rate optimization will help your website become a revenue machine. The list above is far from complete and is meant to get you started.

Create Better Sales Conversions

A website with a well-optimized Google User Experience will surely increase your sales conversions. Whether it’s through better, more educational content, or it’s through deeper-in-the-funnel offers, you’ll want to make sure you’re empowering your viewers on their buyer’s journey. Creating a strategy around full-funnel conversions for your new website is critical.

To get a higher conversion rate, we suggest developing an inbound sales strategy as you’re thinking about implementing the Google User Experience on your website.

Inbound sales is a sales strategy and methodology that prioritizes the needs, challenges, goals and interests of individual buyers. Forget focusing on closing the sale as soon as possible. Instead, inbound sales professionals know they need to meet consumers where they are, and then guide them through the decision-making process. It’s less about push, and more about helping.

In short, inbound sales is a personalized, helpful, modern sales methodology that focuses on a prospect’s pain points, develops a trusted consultant-user relationship, and turns the traditional sales process into a buyer’s journey.

Get Better Reviews From Visitors

You may already understand the importance of social proof like reviews and recommendations from your website visitors, but the Google User Experience can get you better reviews. You’re probably reaping the rewards of referrals. But if you don’t create a way to promote customer trust on your website, then you’re missing out. Testimonials, images of your staff, and case studies about your products or services can go a long way to convince a visitor to choose you.

On a new website for example, make sure you’re planning pages with pictures, descriptions of the services you offer and some testimonials from customers. You can link reviews for your business from Google, showing how you are a credible business and can back up your promises.

If you’re interested in creating a trust to promote sales, you’ll need to spend time creating marketing materials like case studies, testimonials, and/or sharing product reviews and including them in the plan for your modern website. Overall, the reviews found on your website will make your clients want to come back again, which in turn will increase your business profit.

It Impacts Your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Ranking

Many, if not, all businesses today invest in SEO to improve their website rankings. With over 12 billion searches on Google alone, it really pays off to have an effective SEO strategy in place to outshine all other websites that offer the same product or service as you.

Now, how does web design relate to your SEO? In what ways does SEO affect your ranking on Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs)?

Here are ways how web design impacts your SEO:

• Google’s complex search algorithms are made up with web crawlers that obtain and organize information from different websites into search indices. These crawlers then rank the pieces of information they’ve indexed and pulled up those that’ll best answer a searcher’s inquiry.
• For your site to show up on the SERPs, you need to make it a possibility for search bots to crawl through your website, read your content, and save it in an index for ranking. To achieve this, you need to build strong and relevant internal links.
• Spread link equity through your website, you need to create enough internal links between related web pages. To do this, organize related web pages into a pyramid structure. The top-most part represents the main page or the homepage while the different sections and subsections are positioned towards the bottom.
• Internals links help Google better understand and navigate your website. So remembering to link one main topic to all other related pages and vice versa will signal Google that your website should rank for a particular keyword or topic.
• Developing a responsive website is another benchmark through which Google determines whether your website should rank for a spot on SERPs. Thus, it’s important to ensure that your website is optimized for mobile use. This means that your website automatically resizes and fits well on other devices other than that of a PC or laptop.
• With an optimized website, you can strengthen the image of being a customer-friendly business. It’ll serve as a good indicator of being an adaptive service provider.

It Creates Meaningful and Lasting Relationships With Your Customers

In driving business growth and winning customers. Marketers nowadays have adapted to the shift from customer marketing funnel to the flywheel model. In contrast to the traditional funnel model. The flywheel model views customers as a constant component in a continuous cycle. Gaining new sets of customers.

This model particularly focuses on using the momentum of delighted customers to drive referrals by word of mouth and repeat sales. The Google User Experience on your web design plays a vital role in improving the client experience at each stage in the flywheel model. When attracting prospects, your web design must showcase content that is custom-fit to your target customers.

For example, if your website’s main purpose is to sell home furniture. Then it would help to have a design and content that’s family-oriented. Your target visitor must be able to feel the warmth. Coziness of a home every time they scan through your website.

Further, engage clients by incorporating eye-catching visuals to your blogs. Make your website content interactive. By adding social media plugins so it’s easier for your visitors to share content on their personal social media accounts. You can also add a comment section to your website. So customers can instantly share their thoughts and review on a piece of article.

Google User Experience Can Boost Your Profits by Feedback

Through this, you’re able to gain insights of how your visitors perceive your site. From user feedback, you’re able to find ways on how you can improve your service.

Having an optimized landing page on your web design is another surefire way to convert and boost profits. In the long run, an optimized landing page will lower your customer acquisition cost and maximize spend on advertisements.

To do this, you can begin by developing a sophisticated design. A straightforward call-to-action, and a badge of authority that’ll make your customers gain confidence in your website.

It Helps Create A Rich Customer Database

In a rapidly evolving digital economy, data is the new oil. Big players in business capitalize on user data to boost profits. For example, your purchase behavior on an e-commerce website. Collated together with other customers. Who share similar buying habits to make predictions on the type of products you wish to buy in the future.

Fortunately, you can also apply Google User Experience in this regard to boost the profits of your own business!

• You can enable this marketing strategy by using data to analyze your customer’s activity when they land on your page. You can further utilize this data to curate a useful lead capture page.
• A lead capture page functions just like a typical landing page. However, its main mission is to acquire contact information. Its main principle is to ask relevant information from your leads and reward them with a valuable offer in exchange.
• Complement your lead capture page with an interesting and attention-grabbing headline. Body copy, and relevant design to entice your leads to give their information.
• As a rule of thumb. Your goal is not to make your leads feel like your prying into their personal data. Thus, it would help to keep your lead capture page not more than three fields.
• With rich customer data at your disposal. You can influence your customer’s behavior and offer them exactly what they want, when they need it.

The efforts you put into implementing Google User Experience on our website will benefits your business in ways more than you can imagine. From optimizing your content to streamlining ways to capture important data leads. A well-designed website can definitely deliver greater conversions and improved profits. 

What To Do When Google Updates Its Algorithm

Google Updates. We’ve all heard about them and, to some extent, we all fear them. Even if you’re 100% clean and always follow the Google guidelines, you can still suffer from the dirty work of others.

But what do you do when a new Google Update arises? How do you know it’s the cause of a traffic drop on your website? What are the steps you need to take in order to determine that? This section will give you some tips.

Follow the Right Sources

As soon as a new Google Update kicks in, thousands of bloggers start writing about it. Not all resources, however, are trustworthy.

This is not to say that people have bad intentions, but they might be uninformed or might have ran the wrong tests to determine the effects of the update. So where is the right source?

First, we have Google’s Official Webmaster Blog. Here is where Google officials will compile an official statement when they want to publicly announce something. You can also follow them on Twitter at @googlewmc and on their YouTube Channel. However, Google will rarely share any specifics about any update, other than the fact that it has been implemented.

Then, there are the three big news portals in the Search Engine industry which are Search Engine Journal, Search Engine Land and Search Engine Roundtable. This is where journalists and experts in the industry post the freshest news about Google and search engines in general, which means it includes Bing, Yandex and others.

Obviously, sources don’t stop here. You can also follow blogs such as Moz and Backlinko. Blogs such as these will provide the information with a delay but will also often compile it into step by step, very actionable advice and guides.

Check Your Website Traffic to Know if You Have Been Hit

The fastest way to know if you’ve been penalized (and probably the only one as well) is to check your traffic.

You can also take a look at the Search Visibility widget from the cognitiveSEO Tool. If you see a drop there, that could be the sign of a penalty. In some cases, it can also be more relevant than other analytic tools.

For example, if most of your affected pages are on position 40+, you might not see a big change in traffic, as those pages rarely get any traffic. However, if the positions decrease, you should notice a drop in the Search Visibility metric.

You can also use the Rank Tracker to monitor your most important keywords. You can even set notifications that will let you know via e-mail anytime there are changes in the positions of your keywords.

You can also check the Google Search Console for the average position of keywords instead of using the Rank Tracker. If it has dropped dramatically, you might have been penalized.

However, if you’ve dropped only a couple of positions, it’s possible that the update just pushed up other competitors.

Get in Touch with an Expert

You’re going to have to do that research on your own to find an expert who can help you. The only advice we can give in this direction is to double check and don’t rush to make a choice. Here is why you need an expert.

First of all, you will save time. An expert will always know what to look for and will also be able to prioritize issues. Second, you won’t have to worry about making any mistakes or taking any unnecessary action that could potentially do more harm. This, of course, is if you choose the right expert, so make sure you do your research well. Third but not least, the more you stay penalized, the more money you lose! Even if you have to pay someone to help you, in the end, you’ll be better off.

Develop a Strategy for Recovery and Execute It Step by Step

Once you have everything in line, it’s finally time to outline the plan. The secret to a successful recovery plan is prioritization. You might find a dozen of issues, but if you start fixing the minor, most insignificant ones first, you’ll lose money because they won’t have an effect on the penalty and your rankings will still below.

A plan will not only help you execute everything faster, but it will also help you keep track and monitor your results. If you don’t monitor the results of your actions, you won’t know what caused the penalty.

Once you’ve finished one step, give it a rest to see if it has any effect. Doing everything at the same time won’t help you figure out the cause of the penalty, so you won’t be able to know what to avoid in the future.

Keep Doing the Good Type of SEO

Most of the time (as long as your website is not completely deindexed), the best way of getting out of a penalty is to keep doing the good things.

Getting penalized is similar to gaining weight. You add a little bit every day, but you don’t really notice it, until one day the mirror finally ‘breaks’ it to you. The probability of you losing weight very quickly is low. If you’ve gained 25 pounds in one year, expect to take it around 1 year to lose it!

Trying to run 5 hours per day won’t work because, generally, you won’t be able to sustain it. Trying any shortcuts, such as pills and very restrictive diets, can get you into more trouble.

The best solution is to keep doing the right things over a long period of time and results will come. If you’ve followed our blog for a while, you should definitely know what the right things are. If you haven’t followed us… Well, now it’s the right time to start!

Conclusion

Google User Page Experience is going to be more and more important over time.

If you love a site and everyone else loves that site, Google will eventually want to make sure that the site ranks high.

On the flip side, if everyone feels a website has a terrible user experience, then Google won’t rank that website as high in the long run.

Just like any algorithm update Google does, expect to see multiple revisions over time. As they learn, they adapt to make their algorithms more effective over time. When you adapt to the new update, you will watch your business profit increase.