When brands offer a positive user experience, they stand a better chance of engaging with customers. These customers become 67 percent more likely to buy and 74 percent more likely to return to make a purchase (ThinkWithGoogle). Additionally, 16.6 percent of customers who report a positive experience become more likely to make a recommendation (Forrester Research).
Creating this quality experience for customers, therefore, will have a direct impact on businesses’ bottom lines. With Google’s impending Core Vitals Update, set to occur in 2021, the experience organizations digitally create for their brands will also be tracked and used to rank sites in a new way.
While Google has long sought to adjust their algorithm to better identify and deliver helpful, trustworthy sites to users, the Core Vitals Update will place a new emphasis on the first experience customers have when they attempt to load a website. Rather than using a page load metric, the algorithm will now seek to employ a more comprehensive look at the experience of a user landing on the page. These vitals will look at factors, such as how quickly the website becomes stable and interactive.
As Google continues to press forward towards nurturing a user-friendly web experience, brands need to focus on creating sites that meet these expectations. The sites that excel in these areas will find opportunities to build their brands further on the SERP by increasing rankings and potentially earning positions in Rich Results.
Building a strong website in the era of the Core Vitals Update
Creating a strong website in the era of the Core Vitals Update requires careful consideration not only of initial loading time but also how the website behaves once the person opens it. It requires optimizing with strategies such as:
- Optimizing images with compression so that they load faster
- Lazy loading images and videos to improve the page load time and allow users to interact without having to wait for everything on the page to load
- Reducing the payload required of the network and javascript browser
- Prioritizing elements on the site so that the most important features load first, providing users with the most critical content as quickly as possible
- Paying attention to web fonts to ensure that all elements optimize the loading time
Measuring your Core Web Vitals
As you begin to take action to ensure that your page’s core vitals are met, tracking your progress and rankings will play a cornerstone role. Google offers a Core Web Vitals report that provides an excellent place to get started. This report provides insight into your site’s performance based on real-world data.
You will get information on how well your site performed according to three main metrics:
- How long it takes to load meaningful content on the page
- How long users have to wait until they can interact with the page
- How long it takes for your website to be stable for users
You can also see how well your URL performs compared to similar types of web pages. Considering that currently only about 15 percent of web pages have quality metrics in these areas, brands are in a prime position to use their monitoring and optimization strategies to improve their value rankings.
The Google Core Vitals metrics require brands to take a more meaningful look at the overall first experience visitors have on their page. Brands have the chance to prepare their domains for these impending algorithm changes, and the potential to earn slots in all rich media SERP layouts. See how these tips can help you improve your site experience, monitor your progress, and learn how Milestone can help you seize this opportunity by requesting a free Core Vitals audit at [email protected].
