Understanding Google's Page Experience Search Signal
Sometime during May 2021 Google will be rolling out an update that will now take user's experience into account when ranking sites within it's search results. THIS IS BIG!
Page Experience Google Search Signal
Have you ever been on a site and started scrolling and an intrusive pop up AD comes up while you are reading? That type of bad experience is what Google is targeting with this upcoming update.
The real problem with bad user experiences is they'll drive users away from the Browser APP on their phones and go to clean designed experiences like Instagram, the YouTube App, Tiktok, and other eco-systems. There has been a massive trend to App just because the overall experience on even big brand new sites is bad (related: Websites Are Dead).
A typical experience is I start reading an article, then a pop-up video appears, I close it but it then just relocates to the bottom right corner - WHY? Why are all these videos auto-playing?
If you scroll far enough hopefully the page you are on doesn't have an "auto-refresh" script to reload ADs, WTF? SERIOUSLY?!?
So now the auto-refresh page requires me to scroll back down to find my place. If I scroll far enough down there will be a pop-up asking for my email address. Overall even though internet speeds have gotten to Gigabyte download speeds websites experiences are getting worse not better. We can do better and I'm 100% with Google on this one.
The new page experience is combining Core Web Vitals with the following existing search signals:
How To Get Ready:
1. Use search console to do a site-wide audit of your pages (do the most important pages if your website is massive) and see where there is room for improvement. Search console has a report for Core Web Vitals that gives you an overview of how your website performs according to Google's standards.
2. Head over to PageSpeed Insight and input your pages to find out what site-wide and single page improvements can be improve your search signals.
3. Google put together a list of developer tools for Core Web Vitals: Tools to measure Core Web Vitals
You are going to need a tech guy to implement several of the above improvements.
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Obviously Google suggestions using AMP - I personally loathe AMP so I'll never be able to recommend it.
You can read more about this upcoming May 2021 update here: Timing for bringing page experience to Google Search
As we find out more details about Facebook's approach we'll update the page.
Time to get to work,
CCarter
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CCarter is the Co-Founder of SERPWoo. You can follow their activities on Twitter: @MakoCCarter "Today is victory over yourself of yesterday. Tomorrow is victory over lesser men." - Miyamoto Musashi |