Introducing Core Web Vitals – Google’s new method for ranking your website

It’s been more than two decades since Google launched its search engine, and the site has been the biggest and most popular of its kind for all but the earliest of those years.

One of the key reasons for its sustained success is its continual innovation. The process by which the engineers decide which sites to rank in which order is eternally evolving, with changes on a smaller scale happening on a week-by-week basis, and its larger steps forward consequential enough that whole industries sit up and take notice when they’re announced.

The most recent of these major upgrades is the introduction of Core Web Vitals, and whether you’re familiar with it or not, it is already affecting how many visitors your website can attract.

What are Google Core Web Vitals?

In the beginning, Google would rank highest the websites which contained the most words that matched the user’s search query. That’s how keywords were born, and they’re still a fundamental part of search engine optimisation to this day.

But Google never likes to stand still and is on a perpetual mission to identify new ways to locate the best, most informative and most user-friendly websites and to give them priority rankings.

Now, as well as your content matching a searcher’s query, it must also be fresh, unique and well-written, and you must be able to prove that you are some sort of authority on the topic. In addition, your site must also be secure and easy to read on mobile devices, while avoiding employing any of the tricks employed by marketers with bad intentions (even if your intentions are good!)

Core Web Vitals is Google’s next set of metrics which the search engine uses when deciding how to rank your site.

Do Core Web Vitals affect SEO?

The idea behind Core Web Vitals is to assess how easy it is to use your website. Google doesn’t want to point its users to a site that contains poor quality information, poses a security risk or won’t load correctly or quickly enough on their device.

These new measurements, now recorded by Google, are part of the equation it uses when deciding how highly it should rank a website:

• Loading: How quickly the page’s main content takes to load. Described as Largest Contentful Paint, it should load within 4 seconds, ideally within 2.5 seconds.
• Interactivity: How quickly a browser can use a page. A First Input Delay measurement should be less than 100 ms.
• Visual stability: How much the page can alter once in use, for example pictures changing dimension or links changing location. The best Cumulative Layout Shift measurement is less than 0.1.

Google believes that by excelling in these three areas, your site will be more user-friendly, and will assign it a higher ranking.

It’s also interesting to note that Google announced details of its Core Web Vitals update before implementing it. But those who acted early and improved their sites in these areas saw their rankings improve anyway. That’s because, aside from trying to check all the right boxes for Google’s latest algorithm, these changes genuinely do make for a better browsing experience, which organically boosted the popularity of sites even before Google began measuring these key metrics specifically.

How do I test Google Core Web Vitals?

Around 70% of web traffic begins with a search engine query. More than 70% of those queries are handled by Google. So it’s exceptionally important that Google recognises your site.

And because 50% of Google users only click the top three results, and fewer than 10% ever look at the second page of results, it’s vital not only that you rank, but rank well.

Core Web Vitals is obviously important to any organisation with a web presence. But how do you measure up?

Google has made available a suite of tools to benchmark your site for these and other important metrics. These are found within the Search Console, PageSpeed Insights and the latest version of Lighthouse, Chrome DevTools which helps identify visual stability issues, CruX (or Chrome UX Report) which uses data gathered from around the world rather than theoretical insights, and the Web Vitals Extension which can be downloaded from the Chrome Web Store.

Core Web Vitals metrics use a handy traffic light colour scheme so that you can quickly and easily understand your site’s performance. Red is bad and requires improvement. Amber means you could (and should) do better. Green means you’re doing great!

These new metrics are now a vital part of digital marketing. It’s brand new now, but as more site owners begin taking note, undertaking upgrades, and adopting techniques which are continually being refined, they will get better and better results as those who fail to take action are left further and further behind.

For more information on Core Web Vitals, or any other element of search engine optimisation and digital marketing, contact our team and we’ll discuss how we can help your site reach its full potential.