Core Web Vitals and SEO
(upbeat music) – Hi everyone,
and welcome to our session on Core Web Vitals and Search
Engine Optimization, SEO. Today, we’ll be talking
about what SEO is, how the Core Web Vitals
play a role there, and how you can use Search Console to help track and improve
your site’s metrics. For many, SEO is a weird
collection of black magic spells, but once you dig in a bit
more, it’s not at all that. We’ve heard that Google is pretty good at figuring websites out, and it’s tempting to assume that having a clean website means you don’t need to think about
SEO, but it’s not that simple.
SEO is all about improving
the quality and quantity of the traffic a website gets
from normal search results, so excluding things like ads. There are multiple things a
website can do to achieve that. It differs a bit by a search engine, and I can only speak for Google. In general, the main aspects
are the same everywhere though. Make relevant content. Users go to search
engines to find out more, and your pages might be the resource that they’re looking for.
This is more than just writing well. It’s also about picking topics and phrasing that are
used by your audience. Make the content accessible
to search engines. If search engines can’t
understand your content, it’ll be hard for them to recommend it. Show why your site is awesome using the various signals
that flow into SEO. There’s a lot that plays in here. A good way to think about this is given there are multiple
good and relevant results, how can you show search engines that yours is a particularly good and useful answer for users right now? The Core Web Vitals flow
into that last group. For the other aspects of SEO, I strongly recommend checking out some of the SEO starter guides and getting help from experienced SEOs. It’s useful to think of
SEO is a bit like usability. A little bit of information is helpful but when it gets serious, you want to get help from experts. Over to the Core Web Vitals. You’ve heard a lot about the
Core Web Vitals today already. So this is just
a super short overview to help get you started. The Core Web Vitals
focus on three aspects.
First, how quickly the page loads; second, how soon you can
interact with the page; and third, how stable the page is as it’s loading and as the
user is interacting with it. If you’re curious about
more details there, be sure to check out the other sessions and our documentation. When it comes to data sources, we differentiate between
field data and lab test data. Field data also called Real
User Metrics or RUM data is collected from users over about a month and is based on what they
experience when viewing your site.
This is a part of the Chrome
User Experience Report, in short, CrUX. Lab tests, on the other hand, are generated on demand with
testing tools in your browser or on a server using settings
that try to approximate what users would see. For search rankings, we use field data as this is what your site’s
users have experienced over time This makes the data more
representative of your site taking into account where
your users are located and how they access your website. The Core Web Vitals metrics are then combined with
other signals for search. We call this combination the page experience ranking factor. The additional signals
are mobile-friendliness, Safe-Browsing, HTTPS security, and compliance with our intrusive
interstitial guidelines. These have all been around for a while and there’s much written up about them so I won’t go into much detail here. We plan to adjust
these signals over time to best reflect a good
user experience for users. We’ll give a six-month
heads up before any change. The data is split by mobile and desktop and applied appropriately
for search ranking.
When a mobile page is shown as
a separate AMP URL to users, that’s what will be used then. In other words, if
you’re on a mobile page, the ranking is only
affected by mobile data, and the same for desktop. So in short, for search rankings, we use a page experience set of metrics. These include a few existing signals as well as the Core Web Vitals.
We track these based on what users would
see separating mobile and desktop experiences. Cool. We looked at page experience, the Core Web Vitals, and how they’re used in Search. Let’s take a look at Search Console now. Search Console is a free
tool for site owners that gives insights into
Google Search for your website. Once you’ve verified ownership and given the tool a bit of
time to collect all the metrics, it’s time to head over to
the Core Web Vitals Report. In this report, you’ll see graphs for mobile
and desktop showing how a relevant sample of
your site’s pages scores. This sample and the scoring are based on the Chrome user
experience report data. That’s the field data
collected over time. Because of that, any changes that
you make on your website will take about a month
to be reflected here.
Clicking through
to one of these reports, you see a graph of the
total number of URLs tracked and can see the individual
issues flagged below. Going to one of these issues, you’ll see a similar graph on top together with a list of sample URLs for its issue type below. Keep in mind that these reports
are based on the field data, so not all of your site’s
URLs will be available here. It’s often useful to focus on
the bigger buckets of issues across both the poor and
needs improvement categories. We try to recognize patterns
such as shared templates and group those URLs together, as fixing the issue once can improve large parts of your website, which is pretty awesome. A good approach
to improving these issues is to take a bigger issue type
and work to resolve it. After recognizing the issue, the first step is usually trying to reproduce the issue locally
or within a testing tool.
If that’s not possible,
for bigger issues, it’s worth narrowing things
down using the various tools and scripts available elsewhere. Once you’ve reproduced the issue, you can work to improve the vitals. I won’t go into details here, but be sure to check
out the other sessions for more information. As an aside, sometimes you may notice
that other Google products or services are slowing down your pages. Google Search doesn’t
give any special treatment to these just like users
generally won’t care why your pages offer
a bad user experience. Treat embeds from Google, just like you would treat
any other embedded resource. Once your live website is updated, you can tell Search Console
that the issue is fixed. This is done in the
appropriate drill-down report that we saw before by clicking the Validate
Fix button on top. Search Console will then start
a review of the URL flag and let you know how your improvements
turned out over time. Let’s get back to SEO. As mentioned in the beginning, there’s more to SEO than
just page experience. Some of the factors are listed here.
When determining the rankings, we have to weigh these
factors appropriately. In general, we 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. For example, if someone is searching
for your company’s name, it would be expected to
show your company’s website, even if it’s slow or otherwise provides a
subpar page experience.
In cases where multiple pages have similar content, page experience becomes
much more important for visibility in Search. It’s not the only factor. And of course, there’s
much more to a website than just Search. We found that when a site
provides a good page experience, it generally performs
well with users too. For example, we found users are 24% less likely to abandon page loads overall. In particular, we saw 22%
less abandonment for new sites and 24% less abandonment
for shopping sites. There are a few changes that can show this level of improvement for online businesses,
and results like these are part of the reason we
prioritize the web vitals metrics.
The search ranking change is currently planned for
the first half of 2021. With this change, we’re also making all pages eligible to be featured in
the top stories carousel of the search results using
page experience as a guide. If you’re curious about the details, be sure to check out our blog post. Well, that was it, our short excursion into the world
of Core Web Vitals and SEO. In short, while there’s
more to page experience than just SEO and there’s more to SEO
than just page experience, SEO is also definitely a good reason to work on improving your
site’s page experience.
I hope you found this session
useful and insightful. Don’t forget to check out
the other sessions here to find out more ways to
improve your website for users. Bye. (upbeat music).
𝗢𝗿𝗮𝗰𝗹𝗲 𝗼𝗳 𝗛𝗲𝗮𝘃𝗲𝗻𝘀 ᶦˢ ʸᵒᵘʳ ᵍᵘᵃʳᵈᶦᵃⁿ ᵃⁿᵍᵉˡ ᵗʳʸᶦⁿᵍ ᵗᵒ ˢᵉⁿᵈ ʸᵒᵘ ᵃⁿ ᵘʳᵍᵉⁿᵗ ᵐᵉˢˢᵃᵍᵉ? ɪꜰ ʏᴏᴜ ꜱᴇᴇᴋ ɢᴜɪᴅᴀɴᴄᴇ ᴀɴᴅ ɪɴꜱɪɢʜᴛꜱ ɪɴᴛᴏ ᴛʜᴇ ᴘᴀꜱᴛ, ᴘʀᴇꜱᴇɴᴛ, ᴀɴᴅ ꜰᴜᴛᴜʀᴇ ᴡɪᴛʜ qᴜᴇꜱᴛɪᴏɴꜱ ᴀʙᴏᴜᴛ ʟᴏᴠᴇ, ʀᴇʟᴀᴛɪᴏɴꜱʜɪᴘꜱ, ᴏʀ ᴍᴏɴᴇʏ – ᴄᴏɴɴᴇᴄᴛ ᴡɪᴛʜ ʏᴏᴜʀ ᴀɴɢᴇʟ ᴛᴏᴅᴀʏ https://aef5aa-t-ztics23v7-ljxbw4j.hop.clickbank.net/
