robert sebastian

If you want to improve Google page experience, you got to know what it is all about. In essence, Google is trying to tell you as a user or as a webmaster that you need to put the user first.  If you put the user first and strive hard to provide them with the best user experience, Google will rank you higher in the long run as it benefits a user which pleases Google. And if the users are happy while using Google’s search engine, what will they do? They will keep coming back and Google more, which helps Google generate more revenue.

Table of contents:

• • What is Google Page Experience and Why does it matter?
  • What are Web Vitals?
  • How do Core Web Vitals affect the Website?
  • Why Google Page Experience is Important?
  • Tips to Improve Google Page Experience

Google follows the trend. Remember that it doesn’t care about you or your website; today, it has become more user-centric. So, you need to focus on both – SEO (Search engine optimization) and UX (user experience) to give your readers the best possible experience and thereby increase your page ratings and site’s performance.

So, first off let us understand Google’s latest algorithm update – “Google Page Experience”.

 

What is Google Page Experience and Why does it matter? 

 

Google Page experience is Google’s latest attempt to improve search engines for users. Page experience update started rolling out on 15th June and it is Google’s new input for search ranking. It is a set of signals that calculate how users perceive the experience of interacting with a web page on the computer and mobile devices. Google’s new algorithm update combines the core web vitals and previous user-experience-related search signals to measure the Google page experience. 

What goes into Page Experience?

There are a few core page experience signals, that Google has identified as a part of this new update:

1. Boolean checks

• • Mobile-friendliness
  • Using HTTPS
  • No intrusive interstitials
  • Safe browsing

 

2. Core web vitals

• • Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)
  • First Input Delay (FID)
  • Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)

 

All of these factors allow you to identify the issues that hinder online readers from accessing a wealth of valuable information on the web. Google’s focus on these Google page experience metrics aligns with recent search marketing trends that have moved beyond traditional On-page SEO strategies such as keyword density, page metadata, etc.

The advance technical SEO strategy prioritizes the improvements of a website’s user experience through code-level enhancement. User experience plays a vital role in the ranking law of search, and the Google page experience update has provided you with a roadmap to follow.

 

What are Web Vitals?

 

Web vitals is an initiative taken by Google to provide unified guidance for quality signals that are essential to serve a better user experience.

Core web vitals are the subset of web vitals that apply to all pages. Core web vitals are the metrics that help webmasters, marketers, or site owners to keep track of their web pages and optimize the website to deliver a great user experience. These web core vitals measure the ability of a website to offer users a better browsing experience with optimal speed, visual stability, and responsiveness across computers and mobile devices such as mobile phones and tablets. The metrics that makeup web vitals will evolve over time.

 

How do Core Web Vitals affect the website?

Here are a few factors that affect the core web vitals and thereby hurt your page experience:

• Page loading time: If your site takes a lot of time for loading a page, your users will likely leave that page right away. You need to increase your page speed to provide a better user experience.

 

• Broken links: Links that fail to land on a page, or return a 404-error message are called “broken links” or “link rots”. Having such dead links on your page may damage your website’s ranking.

 

• Intrusive interstitial guidelines: Intrusive popups block a user from having smooth access to your web page. Showing popups that cover the main content of the page makes the content less accessible to the users. And it is really annoying! 

 

• User interface: It is very important to have a mobile-friendly website as Google likes a mobile site. If your website is unresponsive, neglects security, and is not optimized for SEO then staying indifferent to the trends may earn you a rebel title as the “Bad website design”. You need to focus on web designing and web development to improve your site’s performance on computers as well as mobile devices like smartphones and tablets.

 

• Security and safety: Google, promotes internet safety and security. Safe browsing is Google’s first priority. Having a website that is labeled as “not secure” by Google chrome will harm the trustworthiness of the website. That is why an SSL certificate is important. It helps to reduce the fraud rate and protect user privacy.

 

Core web vitals consist of three metrics that measure the overall page experience of a website.

1. Largest contentful paint (LCP)

LCP is the first metric of the web core vitals. It indicates how long it takes for the largest content of the page to load. The length of time taken by the largest content to load is called the “Largest contentful paint”. LCP that takes 2.5 to load the effective content is considered good. If your site takes more than 4 seconds then you are in trouble.

 

For example, suppose that you are browsing a new website and opened a new article to read, LCP for that page would occur when the main featured image of the article was loaded because images are heavier than texts. Lightweight page elements and the texts are typically loaded first.

 

2. First input delay (FID)

FID measures the time taken by the site to respond to the user’s input such as clicking, and tapping a button or a link.  Google wants every website to be interactive and responsive as fast as possible once they are opened by the users. For example, if you clicked an interactive element such as a Call-to-action button, the time taken by the computer to register your click and respond is FID.

 

Generally, the response time should be less than 100ms, that’s a tenth of a second. Just like a blink of an eye. Google wants – the moment a user is ready to act, the website needs to be ready to respond. A score under 100ms is considered good or passing. 

 

3. Cumulative layout shift (CLS)

CLS is the last metric in the web core vitals. It accesses the stability of a page. For example, if someone is trying to read content and the page moved, so you have to find your place in the article once again, or if you are trying to tap a button and the page moves unexpectedly and you are forced to click the wrong button, then you have been a victim of a bad CLS. That’s a page layout shift which is called a “cumulative layout shift”. CLS is the total change in the layout of a web page as it loads. A score under 0.1 is considered good or passing.

 

According to Google research, having a poor core web vital score and page experience:

• Reduces the conversion rate: There is a strong relationship between conversions and a good page experience. Pages that load in 2.4 seconds have a better conversion rate.
• Increases the bounce rate: Longer page loading time has a major impact on the bounce rate.
• Generate less revenue: Speedy rendering times generate more revenue than the average and vice-versa.

Websites that have a bad user experience find it difficult to rank higher on Google and drive traffic from SERPs. Optimizing a website with the latest update along with SEO has become one crucial part of marketing strategies.

 

Tips to Improve Google Page Experience 

If you want your website to be rewarded, rather than penalized, with the rollout of the latest Google update “page experience”, here are a few tips to improve your Google Page experience to provide the best possible UX.

1. Use a responsive web design

 If you are not using a responsive web design, then now is the time to upgrade your website. 

2. Upgrade to HTTPS

Google wants to provide its users with a secure and safe browsing environment. Getting an SSL certificate through your domain registrar is inexpensive and easy. HTTPS protocol has been added as a page experience signal by Google in its new rollout update, so if you want to achieve a “good page experience” status in Google search results then, a page must have an HTTPS encryption.

3. Increase the security of your website

Work hard to achieve better standards for user privacy, fraud reduction, and overall safety.

4. Remove popups

Remove annoying elements or intrusive interstitial guidelines that block the access of the users.

5. Cleanup backend code

Several improvements can be done to the backend code to improve page loading time and provide a better user experience. You can remove the unused JavaScript, utilize modern file formats, and minimize large JF libraries with local CSS and JavaScript libraries for building user interfaces.

6. Use a good caching plugin

A good caching plugin can help you store your website’s information so it loads much faster than before for repeat visitors.

 

Conclusion

Google page experience update is going to evolve significantly along the way. With this initial rollout, Google wants to reward the sites that offer a high-quality user experience while de-ranking sites that provide a poor user experience. So, optimizing your website for this latest Google update should be your highest priority. 

Do you need help in improving your website’s page experience?

We have the best search marketing experts who specialize in both web development and search engine optimization. 

Connect with us to set up a free consultation. 

You are now a proud owner of a dynamic and customer-focused small business. You have a well-designed website created as a representation of your business. How then do you manage your website’s progress? How do you inquire about the traffic data?

Find out Why Does Your Business Need Google Analytics and how it can help you manage the traffic to your website and how you can find out the traffic numbers on your website. The main aim of Google Analytics is to help business owners deliver a high-quality website to their customers. Google Analytics will provide you with all the required information concerning your website’s statistics. While most people find it quite scary at first, this is not something you should fear.

How to measure your Return on Investment should be one of your priorities after investing so much time and money in building your new website. You should be in a position to attract as many leads as you possibly can.

Adding Google Analytics to your website is the best way of following up on your website’s progress. Over 10 million websites worldwide have this powerful data-analysis program installed. What are you waiting for? Let’s consider some of the views concerning Google Analytics, shall we?

Google describes Google Analytics as one of the tools that provide powerful digital analytics for anyone with a web presence, large or small. On Mashable, it is described as a system that makes it easy for anyone managing a site to track and analyze this data. It goes further to say that Google Analytics is a powerful free tool that can answer various questions for a wide range of users.

So, what does Google Analytics do? To put it simply, it helps businesses gain insights into their website’s traffic, where the visitors are coming from, including mediums, channels, referrals, sources, and paid channels, the keywords that attract the most traffic and the most visited pages.

This data can undergo deeper analysis to see the page views, bounce rate, sessions, new visitors, returning visitors, and the session duration. That’s not all; you can go further to analyze the exact time of the day that users visit, the browser they use, the device they use to access your website, and the behavior flow.

Besides providing you with data, Google Analytics pushes you in the right direction. It shows you what areas you need to fix to attract more prospects, views, and customers. It will even provide you with insights on whether you need to optimize your site\’s on-site SEO, how to make your site more mobile-friendly, and whether your website’s speed requires to be fixed.

 

Reasons Why Does Your Business Need Google Analytics?

Don’t worry if you are a novice where Google Analytics is concerned. Here, we go into detail on the role of Google Analytics in businesses.

1. Trace your website’s audience

The Google Analytics Reports will help you understand in-depth your website traffic. Get to know the information on your website’s traffic at a glance through the Audience Overview report. This type of report provides insight into the characteristics of your users. It avails details of your viewers’ age, demography, cohort, behaviors, interests, and technology they use. Any business owner must understand the kind of audience your website draw.

You should be able to understand whether that is the customer persona you are targeting. With this kind of data, you will have a clear and consistent frame of reference backed by plenty of data.

Insights into your customer Behavior will give you leverage in formulating marketing strategies to increase engagement with them. It will also help you track your business compared to your competitors. In the long run, you will optimize your site’s performance to make it more target-customer-oriented.

• The Customer Acquisition Report in Google Analytics, on the other hand, provides you with information regarding the channels and sources of your website’s visitors. Such sources include social networks, search engines, and campaigns. These reports tell you how much traffic they attract. They basically help you determine marketing tactics that are working and those that are not. This kind of information will determine the kind of content you present to your audience. You will be able to tell which digital marketing channels are the most successful for your business. By tracking the sites responsible for the most referred traffic to your site, you can focus on developing strategies to gain more referrals from them.

 

• Real-time Behavior Reports on Google Analytics will help you note what is happening on your website when they are actually taking place. It gives you an overview of the number of people on your site right now, the pages and events they interact with, and the goal conversions that have occurred. With this kind of report, you can continuously monitor the effects of new campaigns and site changes on your traffic. Real-time Behavior reports in Google Analytics are crucial in time-specific content marketing. You get insights on when more visitors visit your site. This way, you know when to push content to your blog to give it a boost and increase exposure. It also plays a role in showing you the engagement level of your content. You may want to think of something else if you notice people bouncing off the content too soon. The fact that you can view your visitor’s Behavior in real-time analytics means that you can get details about what is working and what isn’t.  

 

2. Keeps you up with Google’s Search Engine Changes

One way Google makes sure it provides the best possible search results for every user is by updating its search algorithm. Since its inception, Google has undergone a lot of changes and updates. Usually, these updates penalize websites that try to rank highly using cheap dirty tricks instead of providing useful information to website visitors.

Google Analytics is an effective method of enabling you to stay in the game. This is by tracking increases and decreases in your traffic from search engines and other signals that show if your website has been affected by an algorithm update.

 

3. Shows you the status of your website

Now that you have gone through thick and thin to come up with your business’s website, you need to be in a position to know whether your website needs any form of improvement. You want to know how well each page contributes to your ultimate goal: attracting new customers.

With Google Analytics, you can tell how well each page of your website contributes to lead generation. From this, you will know which pages require optimization. Because it can show you exactly how long people spend on your page, you will know where to modify it. You may need to work on your copy and incorporate videos and pictures on the page if people only spend a few seconds on it. You can go even further and customize your pages for a higher effect.

Google Analytics will tell you if a critical page is getting less traffic when it comes to tracking traffic. This way, you can adopt ways that will attract more traffic. Ultimately, you will be able to improve your results and create more business.

 

4. You will know the level of mobile-friendliness you need to achieve

It is no secret that most users in the present times use their mobile phones and tablets to access various sites. Does this affect your site? Definitely, the implication here is that when creating your website, you need to make it mobile-friendly so that many users are comfortable accessing your site from wherever.

But you already have a website in place. How do you tell that your site is mobile-friendly enough? How do you know where to improve? Google Analytics comes in handy in such situations. This tool can show you the statistics on how much traffic you receive from mobile devices.

If most of your visitors access your site through mobile devices, this explosion in mobile traffic means that your website must cater to the mobile user.

Now that you fully understand why your website needs Google Analytics, how about we look at some of the components of this particular feature that will make all the difference in attracting leads and converting them into sales?

 

• Google Analytics Reports

This will be what will push you in the right direction when it comes to making important business decisions based on a huge amount of real data points. These reports will provide you with information concerning your audience’s Behavior, whether it is demography details, age, or even the devices and technology they use to access your site.

 

• Segmentation

Segmentation is mandatory to understand the behavior of various users on your website. Google Analytics has this feature as it shows data based on certain criteria. It tells you how different groups of people interact with your website. Additionally, you get to compare the performance of the segment to the performance of the entire site.

 

• Goals Setting

Most of the successes in businesses take place because there have been goals that were set prior. With Google Analytics, businesses can set goals to keep track of specific URLs. You can set goals to track the number of users that spend a certain amount of time on your site. This allows you to track both customer engagement and how fast your customer service provides support.

 

• Custom Alerts

Trying to continuously keep a tab of massive fluctuations on your site will mean that you have to manually track your site 24/7. What if there was a way you could do this without engaging manually? That there is a tool that can keep a tab and send a custom notification if a change triggers one of your custom alerts? Well, that’s Google Analytics for you.