THE 2021 GOOGLE ALGORITHM PAGE EXPERIENCE UPDATE

Google’s New Page Experience Update

The new Google update is set to launch in May 2021. The update considers the user’s experience for ranking when displaying the search results. Moreover, they also announced showing a visual indicator that highlights pages in the search results that have the best page experience.

What is Page Experience?

Before proceeding further, it is crucial to understand what page experience is. Google assesses a set of signals to understand how users interpret their experiences with a particular web page. These can include the velocity at which a web page loads. A few things are also considered, which are, does it run on HTTPS? Is it mobile-friendly or user-friendly? and does the content leap when loading web pages?

Page experience has its roots within various already existing search ranking factors within Google. These include the following:

• Speed update of a page
• Boosts in HTTPS rankings
• Penalties in safe browsing
• Mobile-friendly updates
• Intrusive interstitials penalty

Google stated that it will test multiple ways how a visual indicator would be displayed in search results. This way, the Google SEO update informs a searcher whether a particular search result is anticipated to have a good experience or not. These types of visual indicators have been used by Google in the past with slow and mobile-friendly labels.

Additionally, Google quoted, “We believe that providing information about the quality of a web page’s experience can be helpful to users in choosing the search result that they want to visit,” The previewed image will help provide a background context for users to know what kind of content a page is providing. The next Google update will soon display icons and labels of these user experience indicators in May 2021.

What the new Google algorithm update means for SEO

We’re pretty sure that you’re aware of the significance of Core Web Vitals. Although a good Core Web Vital score produces good rankings, it is still confusing to what extent the rankings will be affected by the Google algorithm update.

How will the Google Page Experience Update Affect Revenues?

We’re not surprised about you ruining your website revenue and conversions if you are not meeting the current criteria set for a good page experience. Industry research has evaluated a massive correlation between conversions and positive user experiences.

Longer page buffers adversely affect bounce rates
Pages that loaded quicker had higher conversion rates. i.e at 2.4 seconds, the conversion rates were 1.9%

Here’s what Google said about this.

“Providing a smooth journey for users is one of the most effective ways to grow online traffic and web-based businesses. We hope the Web Vitals metrics and thresholds will provide publishers, developers and business owners with clear and actionable ways to make their sites part of fast, interruption-free journeys for more users.”

The coming Google algorithm change would be that if you are unable to meet with the minimum criteria that these page experience metrics require, you will have a pretty rough time ranking your website on the top search results to drive traffic. Hence, getting conversions will be harder.

How can you improve Core Web Vital Scores?

It’s technical to deal with metrics and analytics but here’s what you can do.

• Gain a deep insight into the issue you are facing specifically with your website.
• You can’t really fix anything unless you don’t know what the root problem is right?
• You can use the new Core Web Vital reports by Search Console. It will help you find sets of pages that are around your topics of interest.
• Once you find the pages, You can use PageSpeed Insights to assess issues within a web page

Install a PageSpeed software for speedy performance and to view your results faster. It will eliminate hard work as you would not need to visit webpages to assess issues over and over again.

Now that you know about the new Google page experience update, let’s prepare you for it.

You can now start assembling for your user experience to become a great ranking factor. Search Console’s Core Web Vital report is a great initiative to start getting the know-how of your site’s performance in these areas.

Google will continue supporting AMP however, it won’t be really required for articles to appear in the top results. It is indeed the fastest and easiest ways for publishers that strive to achieve amazing page-experience outputs.

“Google will link to that cache-optimized AMP version to help optimize delivery to users, just as is the case today,” quoted by the company.

It isn’t yet clear how much of an impact this new Google page experience update will have on Google’s ranking factor but many developers and SEO’s expect that this effect will be minor.

They believe the reason behind this would be various existing page experience signals are already portioned into Google’s searching algorithms.

These updates are crucial when users look for improving their search ranking results but it’s still crucial how Google’s new algorithm will be beneficial for users. We have our fingers crossed!