Web Vitals: Impact on SEO

Why should SEO Professionals care about Google's Web Vitals?

Google have announced that a set of page experience signals known as Web Vitals are to be included within their search ranking algorithms from May 1st, 2021.

These new ranking signals will contribute towards how the overall page experience score for each webpage is calculated and will therefore directly impact the visibility of a webpage in associated search engine results pages (SERPs).

What are Web Vitals?

As it continues to strive on delivering higher quality SERPs, Google has looked to the user-experience aspects of the webpages it recommends. The Web Vitals metrics are their first iteration of this and they (Google) have initially defined this experience in the three key areas of page load, interactivity and stability. These aspects of user experience are measured using three core metrics.

• Largest Contentful Paint: (Page load) measures the time it takes for a the main content of a webpage to load. An ideal LCP measurement is 2.5 seconds or faster.
• First Input Delay: (Interactivity) Establishes the time it takes for a webpage to become interactive, and therefore usable. Measurement of less than 100 ms is considered good.
• Cumulative Layout Shift: (Stability) Observes how much the visual webpage content suffers unexpected layout shift as the webpage is loaded. The target for this metric is measurement to be less than 0.1.

Why should SEO Professionals Prioritise Web Vitals?

Only the most relevant and high quality webpages make it to the top of the SERPs as search engines base the results on the outcome of hundreds of ranking factors. With the addition of Web Vitals, Google have now added user experience to their set of ranking factors.

In particular, Google are recommending the prioritisation of Web Vitals for three main reasons:

• Ignoring the importance of Web Vitals may put webpages at significant risk of a drop in SERP visibility with a consequential drop in organic search traffic.
• Webpages that are currently considered as “needs improvement’ may quickly regress to a “poor” status based on Web Vitals prominence.
• For AMP webpages, with “poor” Web Vitals, Google have signaled their intention to make them ineligible for the “Top Stories” carousel SERP feature – and may enforce Web Vitals metrics as an AMP eligibility requirement.

How can I use Web Vitals to gain an SEO Advantage?

Being aware of your website’s Web Vitals and those of your competitors gives SEO professionals a competitive advantage in several ways:

• By identifying Web Vital issues that impede or boost SEO performance gives an increase in visibility over more factors that impact SERPs.
• Monitoring Web Vitals for your webpages enables you to understand the scale of potential user experience issues that can impact on SEO.
• Enhancing competitive analysis by enabling a deeper understanding of how Web Vitals affects the delivery of webpages by competitors. Tracking changes over time is especially important on competitive pages where small adjustments can yield improvements in search ranking factors.
• Web authors, IT service providers and developers can be held accountable for slow loading webpages that impact on SEO.

LCP can vary from page to page across a website as many different factors can influence how fast the content is loaded. However, observing LCP on the key critical templates of a website can provide valuable insight into how LCP impacts on web performance. Therefore measuring the important templates of a website is vital for ensuring a consistent user experience across site.

How to measure and improve Web Vitals for SEO

There are many different ways to observe the Web Vitals metrics including:

• Google Search Console
• Lighthouse
• Page Speed Insights
• Self instrumentation with JavaScript SDK

The Search Console quantitatively shows Web Vital performance and is able to highlight areas for improvement.

However, it may take at least 28 days for any changes made to your webpages to be registered in the Console or the search indexes

Such a delay is not ideal especially if you need to observe the effect of changes quickly. Third party tools, such as Webspeed Index are able to deliver more timely information, together with afull suite of tools to aid historical analysis and competitive analysis.

Next Steps

While Google has been talking about the importance of optimising for user experience for years, the impact will really be felt in May 2021 when Web Vitals become a quantifiable ranking signal as a part of an overall page experience score.

Google has provided many different ways to observe the LCP metric as follows:

Brands that deliver good or bad user experiences can expect to see the knock-on effect in their search traffic, whether that’s positive or negative

To meet this challenge, SEO professionals need timely data to quickly identify pages where Web Vitals regress may penalise their SEO efforts, so ongoing monitoring should be a continuous process and never stop.

If you would like to investigate further and see how your website matches up against Web Vitals, please contact us at Webspeed Index for further details.