In this article, you will learn about Google’s page experience algorithm from Google’s algorithms.
Don’t worry, your traffic is not due to the Page Experience algorithm update because this update has not been implemented yet, but according to Google, this will happen in 2021. Due to the outbreak of the Coronavirus, Google has decided to give us all information about the upcoming algorithm update and what it will contain. In this case, you can adjust your site with this update in a way that your traffic will not be lost.
So let’s see together what is the Page Experience update and how can we prepare for it.
Table of Contents
Google’s Page Experience algorithm
According to Google’s own words; The Page Experience signal evaluates aspects related to how users perceive the experience of interacting with a web page. Optimizing for these factors makes the web a pleasant experience for users using browsers at all levels and helps sites evolve toward the expectations of users on mobile devices. We believe that this will lead to success on the web because users will interact more with sites and can deal with them with less hassle.
Simply put, Google is looking to find out how useful and useful your site is.
What effect does Google’s Page Experience algorithm update have on SEO?
In its official statement, Google states that it seeks to prioritize sites that have better overall information, even if their on-page experience is poor. However, experience becomes more important for ranking when different sites offer similar relevant content.
Therefore, we can refer to the rules developed by Peter Morville of Semantic Studios. According to him, a well-optimized page should have the following features.
- Functionality: All the information provided should be useful for the user in some way.
- Efficiency: The browsing and efficiency of the site should be as easy as possible.
- Desirability: The website should include attractive visual elements (such as visual identity, images, sounds, and even animations) that encourage users to interact.
- Localizable: As one of the principles of SEO, the desired page must be present on different search platforms.
- Accessible: The website must be accessible to all users, regardless of how they access the site.
- Valuable: Site content should provide users with valuable information, something that is truly relevant to them.
- Credible: The page should also be credible in the context of the topic it covers and display elements that inspire a sense of confidence.
There are various activities that are directly related to user experience, but they can also be used in SEO optimization. Although they are mostly useless, they give us a glimpse of what Google expects from new web pages.
Page Experience Factor is based on a union of something called Core Web Vitals. This is actually a group of metrics that are parameters related to speed, interactivity, image stability, and other indicators that are used to evaluate the ability of the website to create a good experience.
What are Core Web Vitals?
According to Google, web core vital signs are a set of real-world, user-centric metrics that measure key aspects of the user experience. As a result, the new ranking factor can be a combination of several variables. Key metrics include the following:
LCP Largest Contentful Paint: The time required to render the largest element on the screen, usually an image, this helps inform the user that the site is loading. does
FID is the first input delay (First Input Delay): the time between the user’s first interaction with the site and the moment the browser reacts to this action. This shows that the site is interactive.
CLS cumulative layout shift (Cumulative Layout Shift): This factor determines how much the layout of the page changes during loading because the movement of elements can hurt the user experience.
Having a proper understanding of these metrics, Google introduces the following parameters to have a good user experience on a page:
- Loading: LCP should not be more than 2.5 seconds longer than the first loading.
- Interactivity: FID should be less than 100 ms.
- Image stability: CLS should be less than 0.1.
Search engine evaluation also examines SEO activities that are already established as standards.
- Mobile-friendly: The pages, along with the structure of the site, must also adapt to navigation by mobile devices.
- Browsing security: The content must not contain harmful or misleading information under any circumstances.
- HTTPS: The page must use SSL security protocols to ensure that all information exchanged with the site is well protected.
- Absence of unsolicited intermedial interventions: browsing the site should be intuitive and without pop-ups, advertisements, and other elements that harm the user experience.
It should be noted that in the field of intermediate interventions, basic elements such as cookie warnings, age checkers and even advertising banners are not penalized, as long as they are used correctly and can have the least impact on the user experience. With these new requirements, Google is trying to help people find and access the information they are looking for as easily as possible. It also helps developers and marketers to provide better experiences to their audience.
How to improve web core vital signs?
Considering the significant impact these signs have on Google’s new ranking factor, taking steps to improve them is critical.
How can LCP be improved?
LCP is a metric that takes into account what a user sees when they open a page on the web. Your site should have a good score in this field.
However, you should keep in mind that content that contains several high-quality photos will naturally receive a low rating. If it is not possible to delete a series of photos, you can consider other settings to improve this section, such as:
- Removing unnecessary scripts: site monitoring is very important, but remember that these features will cost you when your site loads.
- Removing heavy elements: In addition to images and codes, menus and widgets can also affect loading.
How to improve FID?
The FID category changes according to the content model. For example, in a blog post, the only interaction expected is to scroll or zoom in on the text. On the other hand, conversions through the login section or landing page can be significantly affected by this metric. In all cases, to take advantage of interactions on your pages, you can do the following.
- Minimize (or delay) JavaScript: Some plugins allow you to manage and optimize it on the website.
- Removing Non-Critical Scripts: Just like LCP
- Using Cache plugins: Caching reduces the effort required by the browser to load pages.
How to improve CLS?
If your page elements are rearranged on load, the user has to re-learn where they are and may be subject to unwanted clicks. In most cases, a low CLS score is associated with remeasurement problems, so it’s best to consider low activity in this area.
Carefully scale photos, GIFs, and other content on your site so browsers know exactly how much space they’re taking up.
Reserve fixed spaces for additional elements such as banners and forms, or insert them in the background so that other items on the page are not rearranged at load time.
With what tools can they analyze the metrics of Google’s Page Experience algorithm?
Several tools can help you understand what steps you need to take to take advantage of this update. In this section, you can see the main platforms that are available for you to optimize your site.
PageSpeed Insights
When it comes to core web essentials, Pagespeed Insights allows you to analyze page performance based on empirical homepage metrics. All you have to do is type in the URL and click Analyze to get a report based on detailed data that will give you several suggestions on how to improve your site’s performance.
In the upper part of the report, there is a score from 0 to 100, which is related to the page based on the evaluation of all the parameters side by side. It is strongly recommended that sites try to score high for the main metrics adapted by Google, but the main goal is not to get a high score for all your thoughts and mentions. Keep in mind that even Google itself doesn’t get the best scores on this platform.
This tool is very strict in assessment and as a result, many variables are not included in this section, especially at strategic levels. This means that Page Speed is very useful, but it cannot be used alone.
Google Lighthouse
Google Lighthouse is an automated platform for improving web applications. This service, which is provided to you as a Google Lighthouse extension for Google Chrome, simulates various situations and conditions to evaluate page performance. The similarity of the panels to each other is not accidental. PageSpeed Insights takes Lighthouse’s test data and combines it with field data provided by the Google Chrome User Experience Report.
However, in Lighthouse reports, we rely on evaluations beyond performance, as all metrics are tested through controlled simulations. This means that if you want a richer assessment of the integrity of your SEO activities, this tool can provide you with more up-to-date information.
Google Search Console
In the Enhancements section of Google Search Console, you can find core web vital signs data on your site and identify URLs that are performing best and those that need improvement.
Another great way to use Google Search Console to optimize the user experience is to report security issues. From this section, you can identify possible threats that may endanger the integrity of your site.
Mobile friendly test
Mobile friendly is a term used by Google to say whether a site is programmatically optimized for mobile devices. In addition to responsive designs that adapt to different sizes of mobile screens, the page structure should also include elements that improve the user experience on smartphones, tablets, and other devices.
To check your site in this regard, Google offers the mobile-friendliness test, a tool that also reports any loading and rendering errors.
Since the mobile-first update, Google has given priority to mobile versions when indexing search engine pages. So your website must be optimized for this new reality of search engines.
Other tools such as crazyegg are also used to analyze this metric, which we will discuss further.
What is the importance of Google’s Page Experience algorithm?
What sites do you think Google wants to get top rankings in search results? Try to guess. Maybe the sites with the best backlinks? Sites with stronger coding? None. Google wants to give top rankings to sites that users like the most. Suppose you want to buy sports shoes, what is the first brand that comes to your mind to buy? In our opinion, the first name that comes to your mind is Nike.
This is why brand queries (the number of users who search for your brand name on Google and click on your site) affect rankings, this can be one of the most important lessons learned in SEO. you get
Just to see how the Neil Patel brand has grown over time, the graph below shows the number of people who have searched for the name Neil Patel over time.
As your brand grows, so does your SEO traffic, but this isn’t new, it’s been part of Google’s algorithm for years.
The point is that most sites do not have big brands and Google knows this. So even if you don’t have a big brand, you can still rank well. When we look at our clients and their growth over time, we see that only 4% of them have well-known brands. The other 96% can still see their traffic grow.
What Google is doing is adapting its algorithm to more closely align with the mission of showing the sites people like the most in the top rankings. Yes, brand queries are one way to do this, but user experience is another metric.
Over the next few years, you will see numerous algorithm updates that focus on user experience. So how can you optimize the user experience of your site?
You have to start with individual pages.
If you look at the main article that Google posted about the upcoming algorithm change, they emphasize page experience or website experience.
This doesn’t mean that your entire website doesn’t need to have a good user experience, it just means that they want to focus their algorithm on page levels. If you have a few pages on your website that have a poor experience, but the rest of the pages are good, it doesn’t make sense for Google to lower your overall site rank, especially if a lot of your pages have a much better experience than Your competitors offer.
Let’s see how we can optimize the user experience:
1- Optimize your speed and reduce 400 errors
The faster your website loads, the better your experience will be. Go to this page and enter your site URL.
In the Health checkbox, you need to make sure that there are no broken pages on your site. Broken pages create bad experiences. In the site speed box, you will see the loading time of your site. The faster your site loads, the better. Try your best to load your site in under 3 seconds for both desktop and mobile. The ideal situation is that your site loads under 1 second!
2- Compare your experience with competitors
You may think you have a great user experience, but how does your user experience compare to your competitors? So go to this address and type your biggest competitor. Then go to the Navigation section and click on Top Pages.
The Top Pages report shows the most popular pages on your competitor’s site from an SEO point of view. The pages that are at the top are the ones that get the most SEO traffic, which means they are doing their job right.
It is better to see their top 50 pages and check the user experience of these top pages. What do they do How does the quality of their content compare to yours? What are the differences between their site and yours? For each page that is rated, it is better to click on the View All option under the Est section. Click Visits. This section shows you the keywords that each page is ranking for.
When you’re evaluating your competitor’s user experience, keep in mind how happy they are with people searching for each of those keywords. This will give you an idea of what you need to do, but your goal should not be to match your competitors, but to beat them.
3- Analyze your page design
Remember the image above about what Google doesn’t want? Where the user wanted to click on the No, go back option, but due to site design problems, he accidentally clicked on Yes, place my Order. In most cases, you won’t have such a problem, but that doesn’t mean you won’t have other practical problems. How to find site performance problems are heatmaps.
One thing you can do to find site performance issues is to run a Crazy Egg test on your site.
At the top right, click Create New and select Snapshot. Then select Multiple Snapshot. From now on, you should include at least 3 popular links from your site. Over time you should do this for all your favorite pages.
Then you can check everything. If everything looks good, you can click Create Snapshots at the bottom right. You will also need to install your tracking script. So click on the Install Tracking Script option. Choose the option that suits you and everything starts from here. For example, if your website is based on WordPress, select the WordPress option.
Once everything is set up, it will take at least a day to see results, if not longer. It depends on the traffic of your site. If you have thousands of daily visitors to your site, you will see results within hours.
After running the test and a few days have passed, log in to Crazy Egg again and click on Snapshots from the sidebar. Once you’re logged in, you’ll see a list of snapshots you’ve created.
By clicking on each of these snapshots, you will see a heatmap of how your audience interacts with your web pages. The interesting thing about these snapshots is that they show you all the clicks and even scrolls of the audience.
4- Install the Ubersuggest Google Chrome extension
If you haven’t done it yet, do it now: Install the Ubersuggest extension. When you do a search on Google, you get data about every ranked link.
As you use Google naturally throughout the day, looking for keywords related to your industry, we want you to look at two main metrics on Ubersuggest.
Domain Score: The higher this number is, the more reliable the website is.
Links: The more links a website has, the higher it will usually rank.
So when you do your searches, look for sites that have a lower domain score and fewer backlinks than the competition, but still rank high.
They are likely to rank highly for things like user experience. Maybe their text looks better than their competitors, maybe their bounce rate is lower. There can be many reasons for this, but these are the sites that you should look at and analyze.
In the image above, you can see that the results from AMA rank higher than Hubspot, while having fewer backlinks and a lower domain score. Therefore, if you want to rank for a keyword, you should spend more time analyzing AMAs because they are doing something right.