From June 2021, Google core web vitals became an essential signal for ranking. The newly introduced feature helps to improve ranking by providing valuable insights about visual stability, responsiveness, and speed. You must clearly understand what the new feature means for your SEO campaign to leverage it and rank higher. The core web vitals are a set of user-focused metrics for ascertaining the health of a page for providing a seamless and smooth user experience. Any business that values visibility and brand awareness should take full advantage of the newly introduced tools for improving ranking. Google’s advanced algorithms will help analyze small details to provide the best results and content.
How does Google Core Web Vitals Work?
Web page performance matters most to web publishers because the faster page speed, the higher the lead generation, sales, and earnings from advertisement. According to Google, the web vitals should help provide a healthy web experience to visitors, translating into significant business gains if implemented correctly.
Page Performance
Page performance has been significant, and the core web vitals give more options to users to improve page performance. Page performance depends on on-page experience comprising a set of signals that measure the users’ perception of the web page’s expertise. The measurement provides vital information that has much more value than mere information. The page experience metrics include intrusive interstitials, HTTPS, safe browsing, mobile-friendliness, and main web vitals.
Although Google places relevance as a more important ranking factor and considers the core web vitals (CWV) a minor ranking factor, there’s reason to pay importance to CWV. Since popularity is critical to earning links which is an important ranking factor, it becomes imperative that ranking better for core web vitals Google can improve search rankings.
AMP Helps to Score Well
Accelerated Mobile Pages or AMP helps to deliver web pages on mobile devices by trimming down the display to match with the screen size. To do well in CWV, you must pay more attention to AMP because Google shows a preference for the AMP version of a website for calculating the CVW score. If you find it difficult to score high in CWV, then taking the AMP route is easier to push up the CWV score. However, poorly optimized images or slow server speed can hurt the CWV score.
The Components of Core Web Vitals
Having understood some ways of improving the Google core web vitals 2021 score, you should know about the components of the CWV.
Loading: LCP or Largest Contentful Paint
The Largest Contentful Paint rating is the first core web vital related to the average loading time of a page’s main content (text and media). LCP will help Google determine how fast the most meaningful content loads, and it is different from the overall page speed. This page-level metric should meet the Google standard of user experience that expects the content of a page to load in not more than 2.5 seconds. Higher loading time will result in a low LCP score that can be different for different pages because, for a blog, the H1 headline is important content, but a product image is the most essential content on a product page.
Interactivity: FID or First Input Delay
The FID metric measures the time interval between the user action or input and execution of the command by the page. First inputs include clicking links, pressing keys or buttons. Google sets the score of fewer than 100 milliseconds as the perfect FID. However, FID of more than 300 milliseconds is quite harmful to SEO. Reducing the impact of third-party code is the best way to improve FID score:
Visual Stability: CLS or Cumulative Layout Shift
CLS measures the stability of a web page during loading. When loading a page, if the images and links appear to shift down, it indicates a high CLS score that points to the instability of the page elements. Optimizing for CLS enhances visual stability.
It is fair to conclude Google’s core web vitals uphold Google’s user-centric approach in ranking websites. Scoring well in CVW can be rewarding for websites.
