16-07-21Global River News

Alison Fenwick

Search Engine Marketing

alison@global-river.co.uk

Tel: 0800 171 22 30

Read more posts by Alison

This article was posted 3 years ago and is filed under Global River News, SEO Tips, SEO Work.

We design and build stunning, easy to manage websites that don’t cost the earth. A range of Search Engine Optimisation, and Digital marketing tools and services do the rest. Our business, is growing yours!

Google Page Experience Algorithm update 2021

Google page experience update now rolling out from June to the end of August 2021

With over 70,000 Google searches each second Google controls over 90% of the global search engine market (Google Stats & Facts). To maintain this popularity Google is constantly striving to make sure that the websites and content it recommends every time we make a search is the best. It does this by regularly scanning or crawling and indexing every page on every website. Then using algorithms Google calculates which web pages to rank in the search results when we make a search. On the whole, Google is looking for the best information or content; original, well written, from a respected source with some reasonable detail. It is now turning it’s attention to the user experience.

Google realises that if the user experience of websites it recommends is poor, this can disappoint users and they may not even read the content. This is not new. In 2015 Google rolled out their mobile-friendly update (Mobilegeddon) to favour mobile friendly sites in mobile search results. Google is now releasing another major update incorporating more user experience factors called Core Web Vitals. measuring speed, interactivity and stability. 

Should I be worried about my website Rankings?

How worried you should be depends on how dependent your business is on getting found in Google search and how well your site matches up to Google’s measurements of user experience. For most websites around 75% of the traffic comes from search engines (mainly Google), so this is usually quite important. For some businesses a drop of a few places in rankings results can impact business significantly. Having said that, there can be a tendency for website and search marketing professionals to exaggerate the potential impact of Google’s updates. One client came to us after being presented with significant quotes for ensuring their sites were prepared for this update. Then, when we investigated, all the pages on the site met Google’s expectations; so be careful!

How do I know if Google ‘likes’ my website?

As Google Partners, we have the knowledge & experience to see if Google ‘likes’ your site. We can help you access tools that Google uses to report if your site is performing well and worthy of top search results. We can analyse how your site performs in the ‘core web vitals’ that Google is measuring. Nobody knows exactly how Google calculates rankings but we can give you an honest assessment of how you site might fare as the algorithm updates continue to roll out over the coming weeks. We can also monitor closely your site’s rankings and traffic to to see if there is any noticeable real world impact from these updates. Most importantly we can identify any pages on your site that Google considers to be failing or in need improvement.

How can this be improved

Once we have identified if there are any pages that Google believes are perform poorly we run tests to identify which elements in the pages are causing the problems. We can then propose measures to improve those. Having worked on some of our customer’s sites in advance of the roll out, we have discovered there is a balance:

• Customers and browsers like plenty of interesting visual content to make the journey through the website enjoyable
• Website owners like to be able to access and update their content easily
• Interesting visual content and a website that is easily edited can be less favourable to Googles algorithms so need to be managed.

So we find the right balance between the browsing experience and the Google measurements.

What has always mattered most to Google is still at the core of its algorithm : great content. Effective SEO still matters. A solid web hosting service matters. Not cluttering your website with unnecessary images, widgets and plugins will result in better user experiences, and it’s this user-focused approach that Google seeks to highlight.

In effect, you’ll be rewarded for building and maintaining a great website. 

We can put together a whole range of reports on your website and put a plan together to reduce the the impact of Googles page experience update on your business.