Want to rank on the first page of the SERP results? You need to learn more about Google’s Page Experience update 2022.
Starting mid-June 2022, Google has stated that it will factor in user experience (UX) as one of the most important ranking factors.
What’s surprising is that Google announced these changes beforehand.
That’s a departure from their usual style. It gives you an idea about how seriously they want SEO masters and content creators to take their Page Experience update.
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Understanding Google’s Page Experience Update 2022
In the latest Page Experience update, Google will assess various factors on a website to gauge the overall page experience.
If you want to get on the first page of Google, here are some factors from Google’s Page Experience update 2022 that you should focus on:
- Core Web Vitals: These metrics are designed to check the overall user-friendliness of a website. Currently, Google has defined three main metrics but they intend to update them in the future.
- Mobile-friendliness: Google assesses how well your web pages load on mobile devices.
- Security issues: Google checks your web pages for malicious content or malware that may put a user at risk or leak their personal information to other sources.
- HTTPS usage: Google checks if your web pages use a secure HTTPS connection.
- Ad experience: Google assesses if your website uses deceptive advertising that may hinder a good user experience. Pop-ups that cover up your content are an example of an ad that can work against your website.
While the other ranking factors for Google’s Page Experience update 2022 are easy to understand, Core Web Vitals is a new metric that’s more complex.
Let’s take a look at it in detail in the next section.
What Are Core Web Vitals in Google’s Page Experience Update 2022?
As a part of Google’s Page Experience update 2022, Google introduced new ranking signals to assess the page experience called Core Web Vitals.
Currently, there are three main metrics in the Core Web Vitals: LCP, FID, and CLS.
Metric 1: Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)
This metric measures how fast the content on your website can load. Regardless of the type of web page you have created, your LCP should be 2.5 seconds or less.
The lower your LCP, the better the user experience your page delivers.
Metric 2: First Input Delay (FID)
This metric tracks the interactivity of your website. For this, Google looks at the time from when a user starts interacting with your web page to when the browser begins to process that information.
Ideally, the FID range should be lower than 100 milliseconds.
For FID, Google begins to track the time from when a user clicks on a link or a call-to-action button. It keeps checking until the browser can begin processing event handlers as a response to the action taken by the user.
Metric 3: Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)
This metric assesses the stability of your site layout. For this, it measures if some text or an object on your web page might suddenly shift when a person interacts with it.
If there is a sudden shift, it can signal a poor user experience. The ideal range for your CLS is 0.1 or lower.
SEO Practices to Optimize Your Site for Google’s Page Experience Update 2022
Wondering how to maintain your page rankings after Google’s Page Experience update 2022? Here are some of the best SEO practices that you should follow:
1. Audit and Optimize Your Web Pages
The first step is to analyze how your web pages currently fare against page experience ranking signals.
Here are some resources that can help:
- PageSpeed Insights by Google: This tool can help you measure the overall page loading speed of your web pages on mobile devices and desktops.
- TinyImage by Attrock: This image compression tool can make it easier for you to compress all of your image files without compromising image quality.
- Schema Markup Generator by Attrock: Using this structured data tool, you can generate schema markup code for your web pages in JSON-LD and RDFa formats.
- Chrome User Experience report: This report will help you track all of your Core Web Vitals along with other important ranking metrics.
- Web Vitals by Google: This Chrome extension can make it easy for you to track important page ranking metrics in real time.
- Page Experience report by Google Search Console: This report can help you track Core Web Vitals along with other signals that are important to improve your page experience.
2. Create Quality Content
While page experience is at the center of Google’s Page Experience update 2022, content quality should not take a backseat.
Your focus should be to write content that addresses the overall user intent, is readable, and provides value to visitors.
You should also add multimedia elements such as photos, videos, GIFs, memes, and infographics to make your content more engaging.
3. Improve Site Navigation
To provide a good page experience after Google’s Page Experience update 2022, you have to make your web pages easily discoverable. That’s where site navigation comes in. Make sure it is well-planned and follows a logical structure.
To make improvements, check out how users are interacting with your site via the Behavioral Flow report in Google Analytics.
Want more details about Google’s Page Experience update 2022? Check out the infographic below:
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