Your site’s position in the search engine rankings can mean the difference between attracting thousands of visitors or getting zero clicks. However, Google isn’t always forthcoming when it comes to disclosing its ranking criteria.
That’s why the Core Web Vitals are such a big deal. Google has laid out explicit guidelines and provided tools to fulfill these ranking criteria and improve your position in the search engine results.
In this post, we’ll discuss what Core Web Vitals are and why they’re the hottest new trend in Search Engine Optimization (SEO). We’ll then show you how to outrank over 85 percent of all websites by optimizing your content for the Core Web Vitals. Let’s get started!
An introduction to the Core Web Vitals (and why they’re important)
Search engines such as Google want to help users find high-quality, relevant content as quickly as possible. Google considers many factors when deciding where your content appears in Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs).
For example, it looks at the perceived quality of the visitor experience. If your site is slow to load, laggy, or unstable, this will likely result in a poor visitor experience. Even if your website contains genuinely helpful, relevant information, people are unlikely to stick around to enjoy that content. In fact, evidence suggests that 40 percent of people will abandon a site that takes longer than three seconds to load.
Google’s Core Web Vitals project is a new initiative that measures how users perceive a web page’s speed, responsiveness, and visual stability. By analyzing these metrics, Google can determine the quality of the visitor experience. It will then consider this information when ranking your content.
With over 50 percent of website traffic coming from organic search, you’ll likely want to do everything in your power to appeal to search engines. Therefore, you should consider optimizing your site for the Core Web Vitals.
Additionally, these page experience signals can be crucial deciding factors when websites have similar content. Imagine you and your closest competitor both blog about the best smartphones for 2021. Optimizing your site for the Core Web Vitals may result in your content outranking the competition.
How to measure your site against the Core Web Vitals
The Core Web Vitals are made up of three key metrics: First Input Delay (FID), Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS).
FID is the length of time between when a user first interacts with your page and when their browser responds. Google recommends keeping your FID under 100 milliseconds.
LCP is how long it takes to render the largest content element on that page. In Google’s eyes, an LCP of 2.5 seconds or less is ideal.
Finally, CLS measures the number of unexpected layout shifts that occur during the page loading phase. CLS is rated from 0-1, and an ideal measurement is under 0.1.
Before fine-tuning your site for these metrics, it’s a
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This article was written by Will Morris and originally published on ManageWP.