It would be lovely to think that once you’ve achieved your page one rankings for your range of search terms that you will sit pretty in the top position for the rest of time… but, unfortunately, that’s not how organic SEO works and, much like any other relationship in your life, you’ll need to continue wooing Google over time in order to remain top dog.
Google changes its algorithms on a regular basis in order to ensure that search results are as good as they possibly can be, so business owners the world over need to make sure that their websites evolve in line with these changes – or they could see their rankings drop.
If over the last few weeks or so, you’ve noticed a little dip in your positions in search, it could be something to do with the page experiences across your site, as Google has now fully implemented new changes to its page experience signals and unless you prepared for this, it’s possible your rankings will suffer.
So, what are page experience signals?
Whenever Google makes any changes to its algorithms, the idea behind it is always to ensure an optimal browsing experience for users.
All the signals that go into this melting pot are assessed by Google so that each website can be given an overall page experience score (which, by the way, you can see for yourself in the new Search Console page experience report).
These are the signals you need to focus on in order to achieve a good page experience score:
- Core web vitals
- Mobile usability
- Security issues
- HTTPS usage
- Intrusive interstitials (ad experience)
Core web vitals
These measure and evaluate the responsiveness, speed and visual stability of your site, giving you all sorts of opportunities to climb the rankings if you get them right.
You’ll need to prioritise largest contentful paint (LCP), which measures page load times – and you should aim to have your LCP take place within 2.5 seconds of pages starting to load in order to ensure a good user experience.
Also focus on first input delay (FID), which measures interactivity – and an FID of less than 100 milliseconds is important for user experiences.
And your visual stability is measured by cumulative layout shift and you should aim to have a score of less than 0.1 per cent to ensure good user experiences.
Of course, this can all be a little tricky to work out so if you need any help, get SEO experts Ad Rank One to take a look at your site, so we can advise you on any changes that could be made.
Mobile optimisation
Mobile-friendly sites load faster, don’t have many heavy files, ads or bulky images, as this can all affect usability and your rankings. So make sure you’ve taken a look to see how well your site is performing in this regard.
HTTPS
This stands for hypertext transfer protocol secure, the process of sending encrypted HTTP data over a secure connection, thus protecting said data against tampering, forging and eavesdropping. This is what lets your online visitors know it’s safe to interact with your website!
No intrusive interstitials
Pop-up ads and other intrusive interstitials can become very frustrating for users very quickly, because it means that the content they want to see is harder for them to access… and this is particularly problematic on mobile devices, as the screens are smaller.
Even if you had no idea about this update, which was fully rolled out by the end of August, there’s no need to panic. You can still make all the necessary changes now or in the future in order to shore up your website and stay on Google’s good side.
If you need any help or advice about how to boost the page experience score of your site, get in touch with us today.