Understanding and Improving your Core Web Vitals

As you may know, Google already considers user experience to rank pages. Some of these signals validate whether a web page is mobile-friendly or if it’s secure. In its mission to become more user-centric, Google has announced a new ranking factor that will be incorporated this year, 2021: Core Web Vitals. These ranking signals are meant to evaluate a page’s loading speed, interactivity, and visual stability. Let’s go through some key topics so you can start assessing and optimizing your website for these new Core Web Vitals: [TOC] What are the Core Web Vitals? Page experience is a set of signals measured by Google to see if a page provides a good experience when a user visits it. Some of these page experience signals are already taken into consideration to identify a “good page experience”: Mobile-friendliness: Whether your page is optimized for mobile devices. Safe-browsing: Absence of any malicious or misleading content (malware or phishing). HTTPS: Whether your site uses a valid SSL certificate to ensure an HTTPS connection. No intrusive interstitials: The page doesn’t have elements that obstruct its main content (such as a popup covering most of the content that shows immediately after a user enters the site) In addition to this, Google is adding the Core Web Vitals that measure the page experience based on loading speed, interactivity, and visual stability. The Core Web Vitals are expected to be introduced in May 2021 in an update. As the graph shows, Google will use three metrics to measure these new page experience signals. Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) The Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) is used to measure page loading performance, i.e. how long it takes for a page to display the most important elements. This doesn’t reflect the total loading speed of a certain page but rather the first “piece” of content that should be shown within 2.5 seconds according to Google’s standards. To better understand this, let’s look at the loading timeline of Instagram. As you can see, LCP is reached once the logo is loaded, but the login button and other elements are “hidden”. This is because the logo is the largest element on that page, so the moment that it’s loaded, it’s the “LCP point”. First Input Delay (FID) The First Input Delay (FID) measures the time between when a user first interacts with your website (like clicking on a button) and when the browser can respond to that interaction. A good FID is when that interaction takes less than 100 milliseconds. FID only measures the “delay” in event processing; it doesn’t measure the exact time it takes for that event to happen. Scrolling and zooming are continuous actions that have completely different performance constraints, so don’t get confused. Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) The Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) measures visual stability and frequency in which unexpected layout changes occur. A visual change happens every time an element on your page changes its position unexpectedly. I’m sure you’ve encountered with sites (mostly news sites) that an ad banner shows up in the middle of the screen when you are reading the content. This is a great (and annoying) example of a layout shift. However, not all layout shifts are bad. A layout shift is only bad if the user isn’t expecting it. This means that layout shifts that happen due to interactions like clicks on a button, typing in a search box, and similar, are fine as long as the shift occurs close enough to the interaction that the relationship between the interaction and the shift is clear. Take a look at the previous image, the “Click Me!” button appears at the end of the gray box, which causes the gray box to change its size but not its position, so it can’t be considered an unstable element. The “Click Me!” button wasn’t at the start of the DOM, so its initial position didn’t change either. However, the start position of the green box does change, and it’s that element that affects your CLS score. What happens with animations and transitions? Many websites love the use of animations and transitions on their websites. The truth is that content that shifts abruptly and unexpectedly creates a bad user experience. To avoid animations and transitions to impact your CLS negatively, use the CSS transform property to animate elements without triggering layout shifts. Commonly, websites use properties like height or width to use animations and transitions. However, using transform: scale() to change the size it’s better. Similarly, instead of using top, right, bottom, and left attributes to change the position of an element, use transform: translate() instead. Measuring your Core Web Vitals There are many extensions and tools out there that can help you to measure your website’s Core Web Vitals. I will show you some of the tools and extensions that I’ve tested myself, but if you want to know more, you can check out Aleyda’s tweet in which she shares some useful free tools to do it. Are you doing Speed & Core Web Vitals analysis? To prioritize actions w/ clients I've found useful to do competitive speed & CWV analysis to show its importance and impact vs. other player for meaningful queries! Here's a thread about how to do it w/ free tools ⚡️🛠 … pic.twitter.com/PwuZTEbrSv — Aleyda Solis 🕊️ (@aleyda) December 11, 2020 Core SERP Vitals Core SERP Vitals‘ extension is a little bit more complex to set up than the previous one but nothing to worry about. After installing it, you’ll be taken to the Settings Page, in which you’ll need to obtain and enter a Chrome UX Report API Key and choose the device for which the metric data will be shown. After it’s installed and configured, you can do a normal Google search (like one of your website’s most important keywords), and you will see the score of each metric in the SERP results. However, this extension won’t show results for every page but only for pages with existing data in the…

10 Smart SEO Strategies for Small Businesses

A limited marketing budget is something SMBs have to struggle with. They need to use profitable and effective strategies. SEO is a long-term marketing strategy that they could be investing in. Luckily, there are effective strategies that will improve your business’s search visibility. Let’s get started with these SEO strategies for small businesses. [joli-toc] 1. Focus on Long-Tail Keywords Long-tail keywords have low search volume but with focused search intent. You may be asking yourself, “but Carlos, if they are not popular keywords, why should I focus on them?” This is a question I’ve been asked very often, and the answer is that most Google searches are long-tail keywords. Very popular keywords tend to be very specific keywords with unclear search intent. For example, the keyword “hamburger”. What is the search intent? Maybe the users want to search for restaurants, a recipe, a list of different types of hamburgers, etc. This is not an issue with these long-tail keywords: “hamburgers in west Ottawa”, or “how do you make hamburgers juicy”. They both have two different search intents, and it is impossible to know with the generic search “hamburger”. Let’s add some data to this answer. An Ahrefs analysis showed that 92.43% of them get 10 searches per month or less! As a small business, you need to find ways to connect with your customers. Long-tail queries are great for identifying what your audience is specifically searching for. With great content and very little link building, you can rank #1 for these keywords that will drive you qualified leads and customers. 2. Understand the Importance of Technical SEO Your website’s technical structure can have a huge impact on its performance. As a small business, you have a great advantage compared to other big brands in your industry: you can implement and fix things much more quickly. Whenever there is a technical SEO problem like broken URLs, chains of redirects, broken internal links, etc., big brands cannot fix the issue immediately. They need to contact the development team, informing them of the detected issue, and the lead developer adds it to his team’s to-do list. If they don’t have a monitoring tool for this kind of issue, they won’t notice immediately and will likely discover it during a scheduled crawl. Small businesses can identify these issues with a quick Screaming Frog crawling and know exactly which URLs are having problems. They can then fix the issue themselves or contact the person in charge of the website, asking them to fix the issue. You must monitor changes to your robots.txt and sitemap that could cause crawlability and indexability issues and check for broken internal and external links, URLs with redirect chains, website speed issues, etc. 3. Enhance Your Local SEO with Google My Business If you are a restaurant, a dental clinic or a gym, you may want to create a new or claim an existing Google My Business listing to enhance your Local SEO presence. By creating an optimized Google My Business listing, your business has the chance to appear on the Google Local Search results that are shown in queries with local intent, as you can see in the screenshot below: 4. Create a logical web structure Both search engines and users appreciate a website that has a clear web structure. Users can find the information they need more easily. For example, in a small e-commerce site that sells smartphones, you may want to search first by brand and not by model. Imagine you are searching for your new smartphone, but you want to change from an Android-based device to an iOS-based device, so you start by entering the Apple category and then choosing the models that best suit your needs. This is better than first entering the iPhone X category page and not comparing prices with models like iPhone 11 or iPhone 8. As you can see, it is easier to understand when the web structure is “store/apple/iphone-x/” than “store/iphone-x/apple/”. Your web structure should be based on a logical content organization. Make sure to organize your web structure correctly and avoid having pages within sections that are not relevant. Take a look at this crawl map generated with Sitebulb as an example of a well-organized web structure. 5. Have a Mobile-Friendly Website Since Google started migrating websites to their Mobile-First Indexing, companies have invested in having a responsive website to be prepared for this new crawling and indexing approach. With Mobile-First Indexing, Google predominantly uses your website’s mobile version for indexing and ranking. If you created your website after July 1, 2019, mobile-first indexing is already enabled for it. Google has slowly started to migrate older websites to mobile-first indexing, giving those businesses time to deal with potential issues resulting in loss of organic rankings. You can use Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test to validate if your website is mobile-friendly. 6. Focus on Creating TOFU Content One of the main problems small businesses face is getting new clients. It is crucial to understand the AIDA model, which has 4 steps: Awareness, Interest, Desire, and Action. You need to understand your potential clients’ problems regarding your product to create content that will answer those questions. For example, let’s say you are a business that sells computers. When someone wants to buy a computer, they need to do some previous research like the best computer for students, designers, video editing, etc. By knowing this, you now have to create guides that will help your user to find a solution to this first question. This content will need to be reachable to them either on the search results or social media. This first step will let your potential client know that you understand them and answer the questions they have regarding your product. After the user answers its question, they’ll want to know more about your products and what you have to offer. The best way to do this is by letting them know what you do and what makes your business different than…