Google’s Page Experience update for 2021
Do you optimise your website for search engines? Ideally, when a user searches for your site, you’ll want to rank highly—if not first—on the search engine results page (SERP). But, staying on top of the changing SEO landscape can be tough. In this blog, we discuss Google’s new page experience update for 2021—from what it entails to what you need to do…
What is the new update?
Google announced their 2021 page experience update back in 2020. In simple terms, the new page experience signals will determine if the user experience on your site is good or bad and this will influence where Google ranks your site on the SERP. SEO is a vital marketing tool for brands, with over 5.4 billion searches on Google daily. Research also shows that around 93% of online experiences begin with a search engine like Google, Yahoo!, or Bing, so understanding the new changes and how they will impact your website, is super important for your inbound marketing strategy.
Starting in mid-June of 2021, Google will expand its page ranking factors to include the Page Experience signal. This new ranking factor will use sub-signals to decide a page’s overall user experience and rank it accordingly.
“By adding page experience to the hundreds of signals that Google considers when ranking search results, we aim to help people more easily access the information and web pages they’re looking for, and support site owners in providing an experience that users enjoy.”
User experience has always been an important factor, with a recent study finding that 1 in 3 would walk away from a brand after just one bad experience. So, it certainly makes sense for Google to factor these new sub-signals into their ranking criteria.
What are the key components of the page experience signals?
Whilst some of the sub-signals determining your website ranking will remain the same, there are a few completely new signals influencing your position.
Existing sub-signals, that are being rolled up into the larger page experience signal, include:
Mobile friendly: a measure of how well a web page translates to mobile devices.
Safe-browsing: ensuring a page doesn’t contain any malicious or deceptive content, such as malware or social engineering.
HTTPS: whether or not a page is served over HTTPS, an encrypted network protocol and secure alternative to HTTP.
No intrusive interstitials: interstitials can be disruptive and make a page’s content difficult to access, creating a poor user experience.
Image Source: Google
The new components of the page experience signal being rolled out in June are the ‘Core Web Vitals’ (shown above). Google’s Core Web Vitals are user-centric, measurable signals that Google understands and uses as key aspects of the user experience.
These Core Web Vitals include:
Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): this measures how long a page’s largest image or text block takes to load for the user. By Google’s standard, this should occur within 2.5 seconds of when a page starts to load, with an LCP over 4 seconds being ranked as slow.
First Input Delay (FID): this measures how long a page takes to become interactive. The amount of time between a user’s first interaction with a page (by clicking a link, etc.) and the browser actually becoming responsive and able to process that interaction. A good FID is less than 100 milliseconds, while a poor one is anything 300 milliseconds or more.
Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): this is a measure of a web page’s visual stability. Sites should strive for a CLS score of less than 0.1, and a poor score is considered anything over 0.25. Cumulative Layout Shift scores help quantify how often users experience unexpected layout shifts when using a web page. For example, times you’ve gone to click an element on a page and it moves abruptly, causing you to click something else unintended.
How do I view these new changes?
Since this update comes from Google and affects your ranking on the SERPs, it is no shock that the best tools for measuring your site’s page experience are also Google products.
You can measure and track your site’s Core Web Vitals with Google Search Console, which has a new Core Web Vitals report that will offer information about how well your site is doing and what pages could be improved. It will offer valuable metrics, such as the percentage of URLs offering a good page experience and search impressions over time, allowing you to see each page’s performance. Once this is determined, you can use PageSpeed Insights to dive into specific issues and what needs fixing. Using these tools, you can create goals for your site and gain insights into how your page is doing, however, they will not give you an exact page experience score.
Image source: Google
Although page experience is just now being given much greater importance, Google will continue to rank pages with the best and most appropriate content as a priority. However, if there are multiple pages with similar content, then page experience will become more important for your site for ranking purposes.
What do I need to do?
Google’s statement shows that they understand site owner priorities may have changed due to the pandemic—namely, SEO may have fallen by the wayside. However, site owners will be given a 6-month notice period before any changes to ranking factors are rolled out. Google promises to provide as much information as possible, as early as possible—therefore there is no immediate need to take action, just a preemptive nudge that there will be in the future.
“We’ll begin using page experience as part of our ranking systems beginning in mid-June 2021. However, page experience won’t play its full role as part of those systems until the end of August.”
If you have any questions or need help with your website, get in touch with our team today.