On May 5, 2020, Google introduced a new program called Web Vitals, the goal of which is to measure performance indicators related to user experience (UX). Google also took advantage of the introduction of Web Vitals to announce that UX performance will be considered from 2021 as positioning factors in its natural referencing algorithm.

What are Google Web Vitals and what does it change for your website? How to interpret this ad from Google? This is what we will see in this article.

What are Core Web Vitals?

Core Web Vitals or essential web signals are part of a Google initiative to inform websites of essential metrics to optimize to provide a quality user experience on the web

Core Web Vitals are based on three major criteria :

• loading time
• interactivity
• visual stability of the content.

While it was already widely recommended to optimize the user experience to improve the performance of its website, Google is making it official for the first time to take these factors into account in its website ranking algorithm , from 2021 (” not before 2021 “).

The three Core Web Vitals are therefore added to a list of recommendations included in Google’s algorithm such as having a secure HTTPS website and adapted for mobile :

Recognizing that users’ expectations for web experiences can vary depending on the site and the context, Google presents these three UX criteria as the universal quality indicators to follow for all websites .

How are essential web signals measured?

The Core Web Vitals of a website are measured based on the following criteria:

The Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)

C and indicator measures the time taken by the page to load the largest element contained in the display space of a web page (viewport).

The First Input Delay (FID)

C and indicator measures interactivity and responsiveness to quantify the experience that users get when they first attempt to interact with a page.

Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)

C and indicator measures  visual stability and quantifies the extent of potential unexpected changes in the layout of visible content.

How to measure the Core Web Vitals of your website?

Google wants to make measuring Core Web Vitals easier for all website owners. To do this, the search engine has updated several of its already available tools and is also working on new features.

Tools updated in the coming months

While it is still early days to accurately illustrate how these UX indicators will be presented to the public, Google announces that it will soon update its main current measurement tools such as:

• Lighthouse
• Chrome DevTools
• PageSpeed ​​Insights , Google’s benchmark speed calculator
• The “Speed” report of your Search Console already renamed “Essential Web Signals”

A new Chrome extension

In parallel with these updates, Google is also announcing that it is working on a Chrome extension to quickly check the performance of each Web Vitals indicator for any web page from Google’s browser. The developer preview version is available on GitHub.

What impact for SEO and for SMEs?

Following its initial announcement at the beginning of May, Google added on May 28, 2020 that Core Web Vitals metrics would be incorporated into the already very numerous SEO factors describe from SEO services in Pakistan in 2021.

An announcement in the continuity of the evolution of SEO

While this ad may at first glance seem like a major SEO scoop, it should be viewed with hindsight.

Indeed, the ads published by Google in recent years have rarely resulted in major changes in the positioning of websites. The SEO industry did not wait for this announcement to place load speed and user experience on the list of criteria to take into account to optimize its SEO. The Core web Vitals therefore formalize the importance of these aspects . UX will therefore certainly not surpass or replace major SEO factors such as content and domain authority.

Does that mean UX won’t be that important to Google? No, otherwise Google wouldn’t invest in all of these updates.

UX as a differentiator between similar websites

UX will not replace the content of a site or its domain authority, but it could well be used by Google to decide between websites with similar profiles .

If two websites with the same domain authority choose to target a similar keyword  across two optimized content of the same size, the Web Vitals metrics may well have the final say and decide which site will be more visible.

If it retains a secondary place after the essential criteria of content and “off-site” ( creating backlinks and improving your domain authority), UX will still be a factor to consider in any SEO strategy. On search engines, the margins between competitors are sometimes very fine, hence the importance of optimizing everything under your control, such as Web Vitals.

Finally, Google also stresses that UX will be an eligibility and positioning factor for content displayed “Top Stories” in Google News. With this news also disappears the need to offer the AMP format.

What to remember from Core Web Vitals

In line with SEO EAT , Core Web Vitals come to reinforce and concretize the guideline that Google follows year after year, announcement after announcement: to offer the best possible search experience to its users . If you need to focus on producing good SEO content first , Core Web Vitals are still an important factor to keep in mind.

In other words, if your web strategy is already armed with industry best practices, this announcement shouldn’t act as a “game changer” for your business. On the other hand, if you had spotted some bugs related to the user experience on your website, or if your loading speed is slow, it would be good to anticipate the activation of Web Vitals in the Google algorithm and to proceed. to optimizations before the end of the year!