Google’s Page Experience Update is Coming: Will Your Website Be Ready?

Every digital marketing specialist is familiar Google’s major search ranking announcements. In their most recent update, the tech-giant told developers about the latest Google algorithm change coming in 2021. This new update will see the inclusion of a new factor called page experience.

This new update will directly impact how your website ranks on Google. To ensure users know how their websites stack up on the experience scale, Google is also launching Web Vitals, which will measure and help you enhance the user experience on your website.

What is page experience?

According to Google, page experience is as follows:

In simpler words, they’re trying to analyze how easy it is to use your website. The purpose of th update is to ensure that the websites ranked high on the search engine aren’t creating a poor experience. The simplest way for you to think about this is if your website is user-friendly, you’ll rank higher than websites that aren’t.

That said, this comes with a ground-breaking change in search engine optimization.

Why is page experience important?

Google wants to rank highly the websites that its users love the most. A user doesn’t necessarily look at the quality of your backlinks, or other more technical features central to SEO. For a better understanding, here’s an example:

If you wanted to buy shoes, the first name that would pop up in your head would be Adidas or Nike. And if you need a smartphone, the first two brands you would think of would be Apple or Samsung.

In the same way, Google prefers to rank brands higher that have the most brand queries. A brand query is when a user types a brand’s name to search for them on a search engine. This means that as your brand name continues to grow, so will your SEO traffic. But that’s old news.

Building a brand that can generate strong brand recall takes a lot of time and effort, and Google knows this. So even when you don’t have a recognizable brand name, you’ll still be able to rank. With the page experience update, Google’s new algorithm will be more focused on showing websites that users like the most.

But this doesn’t mean brand queries don’t matter anymore. Since Google wants to prioritize good page experience, they’re introducing another metric that measures user experience this time around..

So how do you improve the user’s experience?

Go page by page

In the article posted by Google at the time of this announcement, they discuss prioritizing website experience or page experience. This means your whole website doesn’t need to have a good experience. Instead, you have to think about optimizing the user’s experience with every page.

This is essential because if you optimize the pages on your website that get the most traffic, you can easily rank high. This way, you don’t have to optimize every page on your website, if you can just rank high by only optimizing a select few.

But how do you do this?

Decrease 400 errors and increase speed

On the internet, speed is the name of the game. There are several tools online that you can use to check your website’s overall health and the number of broken pages you have on your website. These tools can also tell you how long your website can take to load on an average internet connection. Try to keep the load time under 3 seconds.

Do a design analysis

In most cases, developers can create a good design, but usability remains an issue. One way you can find usability issues on your website is through a heat map - you can do this by running a Crazy Egg test on your website. Once you’ve completed the setup, you’ll see how your website visitors are interacting with it.

Visual indicators

If understanding how well you rank on the page experience list is still confusing for you, you’ll be glad to know that Google will also introduce an indicator for the feature. If the indicator favors your website, it’ll be a lot more likely that the users will prefer your website over your competitors.

Even though Google hasn’t clarified what the indicators will look like, this does give one the idea that Google is taking the user’s experience seriously.

Wrapping up

Your website’s user experience will go on to become an increasingly important metric with time. If you’re able to create a website that everyone loves to visit, Google will easily rank you on the top of their search results.

However, no matter how helpful your website’s content is, your website won’t rank on the top of search results if it isn’t easy to use. But just like any new product, service, or algorithm, we’ll see how this idea further improves over time.