Understand the Page Experience Update, Google’s New Ranking Factor

Associate with web development company New York to optimize your website according to the latest algorithm updates and gain better ranking, traffic and ROI.

Google frequently makes algorithm updates to ensure quality content and provide users with the best experience possible. If you are striving to improve your website’s ranking, make sure to optimize your website with each new Google algorithm update. Associating reliable web development company New York is the best way to do this and attract more targeted traffic.

The next Big Google update is the Page Experience Update. Google has announced that in May 2021, page experience signals will be included in Google Search ranking. This new algorithm update incorporates new signals to determine search ranking.

What is the Page Experience Update?

In simple terms, it is a combination of existing user experience signals with other signals known as Core Web Vitals. Google is focused on providing an excellent user experience when people surf the Internet. User experience is critical in this competitive digital world. If users find it difficult to navigate through a website, they will get frustrated and will be unlikely to return to it. On the other hand, website navigation designed with users in mind that helps them find the information they need quickly and easily, will make people likely to return to the site.

Google is launching Page Experience signals along with Core Web Vitals to give more importance to websites that provide a great user experience. Page Experience adds the following 3 Core Web Vitals to the search algorithm:

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): This signal focuses on how long it takes for the main content of your webpage to load.
• First Input Delay (FID): Testing with signal will show “how long until you can click on elements on the page, how long until you can actually use the website as intended”.
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): This test shows the amount of space that a visual element might move while the page is loading

The Page Experience update also includes other metrics:

• Safe browsing: It allows webmasters to resolve issues regarding the security of the website. No malware, deceptive practices are used on the website. It also suggests recommendations for each type of security.
• Mobile friendliness: Google has focused on mobile friendliness of website since 2015. Mobile friendliness is seen as a ranking signal due to the rising mobile friendly website in search results. Websites need to be optimized for mobile users.
• HTTPS: Google encourages website owners to adopt HTTPS in order to protect their users’ connections to their website, regardless of the content on the site. HTTPS provides 3 layers of protection: encryption, data integrity and authentication.
• No intrusive interstitials: This is a way of saying that your website doesn’t use pop ups or any other types content that tend to block the webpage content that your users want.

Get Ready For Google’s Page Experience Update

Google’s Chrome’s Developer Tools Lighthouse Report:

• Open the page the you want to test using Developer Tools: If you are a web master or digital marketer, it is important skill that you should be comfortable with. Lighthouse is one of the tabs in Dev Tools that help you to generate a Lighthouse usability report without leaving the page.
• Choose Lighthouse and click on “Generate report”: You can get a cleaner report if run it in Incognito mode. From a Chrome Lighthouse report you can get performance report, accessibility report, best practices report, SEO report. Under each of these report, you can get more information about web standards that includes:
• Largest Contentful Paint (Loading Time)
• First Input Delay (Interactivity)
• Cumulative Layout Shift (Visual Stability)
• Website Accessibility
• Pop-ups that create accessibility issues,
• Any known security vulnerabilities from Javascript libraries or other code implementations you may have
• Mobile-friendliness

Check Core Web Vitals in Google Search Console: With Google Search Console you can determine how Core Web Vitals are running on your website. In the past few months, Google has been adding new features to their Search Console UI to feature Core Web Vitals. It gives you an immediate bird’s-eye view of how your signals look for all your crawled URLs. This reporting is not as detailed as Lighthouse reports in Dev Tools. The solution is to use Search Console to find problem URLs and Lighthouse to get a clear picture about what is going on by opening the URL individually.

Conduct a website quality audit: For SEO focused solutions, run a website quality audit. Include

• XML sitemaps
• Majestic ( links data)
• DeepCrawl
• SEMrush
• Google Analytics
• Google Search Console
• The Page Experience Update will be launched in May 2021

Google will begin testing visual indicators to find pages that meet all of the page experience criteria. Apart from all these new changes, some of the old metrics like good content, relevant keyword research, link building etc are some of the SEO factors that will continue to remain important ranking elements for website optimization. Businesses can associate with web development company New York to optimize their website according to the latest algorithm update and gain better raking, traffic and ROI.