Google has been indicating that UX is important for a while now. Google has already been using the following Page Experience metrics as ranking signals:
- Mobile friendliness: Does your site effectively work on mobile? Google’s mobile-first crawlers want to make sure that you are giving users the best experience on mobile possible, especially because 61% of Google’s U.S. organic search traffic came from mobile in 2020 and that number will only increase.
- Safe and secure browsing with HTTPS: HTTPS has been a confirmed ranking factor since 2014. Google wants to make sure that searchers are interacting with safe and secure websites within the Google index.
- Low quality or possibly spam content: Google has explicitly expressed that they want the content within their index to be expert, authoritative, trustworthy, and high-quality.
Core Web Vitals and User Experience
Core Web Vitals is just a logical extension of these other Page Experience metrics. Google wants to ensure that searchers are landing on pages that give them exactly what they are looking for in a way that is intuitive and creates a pleasant experience on the site.
With Core Web Vitals, Google is enticing website owners and developers to follow the best practices of UX in their website creation to create user friendly websites by leveraging rankings. Meeting the standards of Core Web Vitals across the different metrics could be a tie-breaking ranking factor and the difference between ranking for an important keyword and a competitor taking your brand’s place.
Google had % of all searches in 2020. The other major search engines generally follow suit with Google, so it is likely that the other search engines will begin rolling out their own ranking factors like Core Web Vitals.
BEST TOOLS TO CHECK CORE WEB VITALS
- Core Web Vitals Dashboard in Google Search Console
- PageSpeed Insights
- Lighthouse for Developers
- Chrome DevTools, which you can find by going to the right-hand corner of your Chrome browser, hovering over More Tools, and selecting Developer Tools.
- Web Vitals Chrome extension
- Experte Core Web Vitals Check
- CrUX Dashboard Creator from Github
UNDERSTANDING CORE WEB VITALS METRICS
It can be a little difficult to understand what the different Core Web Vitals are referring to and what the scores mean. As mentioned prior, Core Web Vitals are a tie-breaking ranking factor: you want your scores on the Core Web Vitals metrics to be better than those of your competitors. While top scores across the board are ideal, it is most important to have stronger scores than your competitors so that you have a better chance of ranking against them.
Core Web Vitals also use field data to collect real-life data points over the last 28 days and give an accurate measure of each metric included in Core Web Vitals. To receive a passing “Good” evaluation on a metric of Core Web Vitals, 75% of visits to your site must be within the “Good” range for a given metric. Meaning: if 75% of visits to your site experience a LCP of 5 seconds, then the score for that page will be based off that 5 seconds and will be given a “Poor” evaluation for LCP. Using this 75 th percentile, a 28-day window, and field data gives a more accurate view of how a site is performing against these metrics.
Having “Good” scores across all three Core Web Vitals metrics counts as passing the Core Web Vitals assessment. This means that your page delivers a positive page experience and, with the roll out of Core Web Vitals as a ranking factor, your page will be rewarded for having fast loading times, interactivity, and strong visual stability.