Your eleventh-hour SEO intel on Google's Core Web Vital metrics
- SEO |
A new article on Marketing Land says that with page experience a definite search ranking signal moving forward, improving your web performance and optimizing your rich media has become an even more important factor for business success.
Before Google, you had to trawl through a lot of written content to find what you were looking for. Once the search engine giant arrived, it started to develop "algorithms that scored the content it was indexing against specific criteria." These days, those criteria are still evolving. While the basics of SEO are still important, Google has been making it crystal clear that end-user experience matters, not least with its announcement of new Core Web Vitals.
Here, Marketing Land takes a closer look at the three metrics that matter most and discusses Google's recommended thresholds for each:
This is quite a detailed piece, but it's well worth visiting via the above link and giving it a proper read. The article breaks things down in a very readable way, and this is going to be very useful for some as the algorithm kicks in next month!
Before Google, you had to trawl through a lot of written content to find what you were looking for. Once the search engine giant arrived, it started to develop "algorithms that scored the content it was indexing against specific criteria." These days, those criteria are still evolving. While the basics of SEO are still important, Google has been making it crystal clear that end-user experience matters, not least with its announcement of new Core Web Vitals.
Here, Marketing Land takes a closer look at the three metrics that matter most and discusses Google's recommended thresholds for each:
- Largest Contentful Paint, or LCP -- This metric measures the loading time for a page's main content, which is oftentimes a hero image or other visual element. Google's threshold here? Less than 2.5 seconds. It's important to note that in 2011, Kissmetrics found that 47% of consumers expect a site to load in 2 seconds or less. That was 10 years ago. User expectations have only increased since that time, further emphasizing the need for sites to visually load as fast as possible for an ideal user experience.
- First Input Display, or FID -- Interactivity is measured with FID, assessing the time it takes for a page to respond to user input, like clicking on a dropdown menu, engaging with a video or filling out a form. A user expects that when a page looks "ready" for them to engage, that it's actually able to be viewed and interacted with as intended. Google's threshold for FID is now set at less than or equal to 100 milliseconds.
- Cumulative Layout Shift, or CLS -- Page stability, especially on mobile devices, is another element of the user experience that can cause someone to bounce from a site. CLS measures any unexpected shift of visual page content as that content "paints" to the screen. The CLS threshold, as determined by Google, is less than or equal to 0.1.
This is quite a detailed piece, but it's well worth visiting via the above link and giving it a proper read. The article breaks things down in a very readable way, and this is going to be very useful for some as the algorithm kicks in next month!
