Are you running a start-up that’s currently getting its butt kicked in the Google rankings?
It’s frustrating and often feels like an unfair fight. Your competitors are bigger and more established. They can also out-spend you and hire more resources to fight their SEO battles for them.
How are you supposed to make up the gap? You can’t out-spend them, but you can out-strategize them. You can also actually use their size against them.
Google’s Core Web Vitals update is the perfect opportunity for you to make up some ground and we are going to show you how to do it. Also, if you need some help making sure you’re ready for this update, we invite you to visit SEOToronto.ca to learn more.
What is Google’s Core Web Vitals Update?
If you want to see a group of marketers stop what they’re doing and give you their full attention, whisper the words “Google update” nearby. Those two words never cease to evoke fear and conjecture from the entire marketing industry.
Through all the confusion and speculation, most Google updates are a step in the same direction: Creating a better experience for human users. Google’s new Core Web Vitals are certainly no different – the user experience is front and center.
This update will combine:
- New ‘Page Experience’ Signals
- Core Web Vitals
Here’s a broad look at what they will include.
Page Experience Signals
This is a collection of a number of different-but-related metrics that combine to give Google an indication of what type of user experience you’re giving your visitors.
They are:
- Mobile-friendliness: How does your site perform on a mobile device?
- Safe-browsing: Does your site have any potential security issues?
- HTTPS-security: Is your site served over a secure HTTPS connection?
- Intrusive interstitial guidelines: Are there cumbersome interstitial banners or ads?
Each one of those signals helps you ensure that you’re giving users a safe and frictionless browsing experience. And if your site was not-so-good in any of these categories, you were probably going to run into problems anyway. In fact, preparing yourself for this update can help you reduce your site’s abandonment numbers by 24%.
Core Web Vitals
On a very simple level, Google’s Core Web Vitals are all about speed. But they’re new and granular ways to think about speed.
They are made up of:
- Largest Contentful Paint: How long does it take a page’s biggest image/video/asset to load?
- First Input Delay: How long until this page is clickable or interactive?
- Cumulative Layout Shift: How long until this page’s elements stop shifting and moving?
Basically, if you’re seeing good speeds in these categories, you’re avoiding the 3 biggest annoyances to any user.
- Waiting too long for a page to load
- Seeing a link or button, but not being able to click it… yet
- Trying to click something, but the page’slayout shifts, which leads the user to click on the wrong thing.
Google has always rewarded fast sites and good experiences, but this takes it a step further.
Why This is Good News For You
Your nimbleness and your ability to react are your competitive advantages.
A larger organization has to have several meetings and go through a number of layers of approval before they can roll out substantial website changes. If they’re a chain or a franchise, they may have to worry about how they’re going to implement these changes across multiple websites, managed by different people, in multiple cities.
You don’t have to worry about any of that. You (or your webmaster) can just go right into auditing your site using the following tools:
- Google’s mobile-friendly test
- Search Console’s new Core Web Vitals Report
- PageSpeed Insights
- Lighthouse
- Chrome DevTools
- Chrome UX report
If these tools reveal any opportunities for improvement, don’t hesitate. Start making improvements right away. Google has stated that their Core Web Vitals update won’t be official until some time in 2021. But there is no harm in starting right now. In fact, your speed and user experience are probably already impacting your rankingsas we speak, so making these changes could help you immediately.
This is also particularly good news if you’re rolling out your start-up’s first-ever website. You can ensure that everything works perfectly right out of the box.
For once, your size is your advantage. Your larger competitors don’t have access to better tools or more information about these changes.
So, don’t delay. Act now!