The Essential Google Page Experience: What Impact For SEO?

It’s no secret that ranking sites in the results of the Google search engine is not the result of chance. Google uses algorithms that consider several criteria to decide the positioning of websites. The purpose of this maneuver is to offer a good browsing experience to Internet users. However, Google has officially announced that new criteria will be added to those that already exist to optimize this experience. And this update has been dubbed Google Page Experience. Explanations.

Google Page Experience: What Is It?

Google is constantly looking for ways to improve the quality of its services. To do this, it prioritizes the user’s browsing comfort by doing upstream sorting and classification work. This allows it to present the best results and highlight companies and sites that take the time to develop good communication marketing to make their pages successful.

The Google search engine, therefore, uses an algorithm that considers several criteria and signals that define the relevance of a website and make it possible to determine its positioning in the results. This is what the Google Page Experience is all about. This is the set of techniques used by Google to target the best-performing sites. These will appear at the top of the results pages to improve the user experience. Google has officially announced that it will update its algorithm in May 2021 to add UX (User experience) criteria to the usual criteria.

What Are The Google Page Experience Ranking Criteria?

There are already many criteria that Google takes into account to evaluate a site’s SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Let us mention, among others:

the content, which must be relevant, adapted to a need or search of Internet users, rich and free of duplication;
the mesh of the site (net linking and backlinking), all the internal and external links that the site has;
the basic techniques, the good markup of the site, the good semantics, and the robots. Txt, sitemaps, redirects, etc.

However, these criteria are now insufficient. Indeed, more and more Internet users choose sites according to their browsing comfort. Google has therefore added to those mentioned above criteria that measure the quality of the user experience:

The FID is the speed of responsiveness and interactivity of a web page. It should ideally be less than 100 ms.
The CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift) measures a page’s visual stability, that is, the movements of elements that the Internet user will observe during a download. It must be less than 0.1.
The LCP is the total download time. The content must be displayed quickly, in less than 3 seconds.

Apart from the Core Web Vitals, other signals are considered by Google’s Page Experience. This is, for example, mobile-friendly, which is the accessibility of sites on mobile devices. Then browsing safety ensures the site does not develop malicious or unwanted content. Then HTTPS is a protocol allowing to offer a secure connection to Internet users. Finally, there is the control of intrusive advertisements, which harm the navigation of the Net surfer and make it laborious.

How To Prepare Your Website For This Update?

This Google update should push web distributors to be more productive. Also, you first need to know your ongoing degree of execution against UX flags and find out about Google devices to develop it further. The activities to be carried out are as per the following:

Use Lighthouse to measure your site’s performance with assigned scores or perform a web audit.
Improve the loading speed of your site’s pages by using PageSpeed Insights, which takes into account the Core Web Vitals. An expert opinion will be useful for you to know the actions applicable to your site.
Use real-world data to identify strengths and weaknesses that could be improved against UX criteria with the Chrome User Experience Report API.
DevTools Performance panel, thanks to its Experience section, allows you to detect the movement of unwanted elements that affect the user experience.
Pinpoint the pages that need to be optimized on your site and precisely define these optimizations thanks to the Core Web Vitals report of the search console.

Alternatively, use the Web Vitals Chrome extension to access Core Web Vitals from your browser easily. With this update, Google is challenging web publishers. It is, therefore, urgent for each of them to take measures of the thing and to ensure that they are always up to date after the deployment of the update.