Search Sessions - Preparing Your Website for Google's Page Experience Update
- 1. How to Prepare for Google’s Page Experience Update WITH Kristine Pratt Director of Content Maja Teagle SEO Manager SEARCH SESSIONS Rohit Dey Head of Revenue - Americas & EMEA
- 2. Agenda 1 2 3 4 Q&A Introductions What is the Google Page Experience Update? How to Improve Website Performance & User Experience How to Improve Your SEO Strategy for the Google Page Experience Update 5 How will the Page Experience Update Impact Website Performance? 6
- 3. 95+ Countries of Presence(1) ~2500 Customers Worldwide(1) 48Bn Experiences Optimized Per Month (1) ~19,000 Websites Powered by VWO (1) Note: (1) Financial Year (FY) ending Mar’19 About Launched in 2010. We have been in the testing & optimization space for a decade. ~250 employees. All remote but globally mobile. 100% funded by customers. Since inception, we’ve grown without needing investor financing. Bootstrapped & profitable since year 1. About Rohit Dey Head of Revenue, Americas & EMEA With over 12 years of experience, Rohit is a seasoned conversion optimization consultant and has helped 500+ brands choose the right platform for their conversion optimization needs. Rohit is an evangelist of experiment-led and user experience-led growth.
- 4. “We offer affordable SEO specifically for small to medium- sized businesses. By supporting these businesses, we (and you) are supporting the backbone of economies all around the world.” 78,000+ Keywords On Page 1 Of Google In 2020 30,000 Full-service Customers 17 Countries 2.3 Million Keyword Rankings Tracked Per Month 9 Languages 86% Of Our Customers Get On The 1st Page Of Google Within 6 Months The Global Leader in SMB SEO Gavan Thorpe, Boostability CEO Full-Service SEO + Reporting Content Writing Website Design & Build
- 5. What is the Google Page Experience Update?
- 6. What is Google Page Experience Update Nearly a year ago, Google announced what we now know to be the Google Page Experience Update improving user experience, addressing site speed issues, and improving Core Web Vital Metrics. Overall this upcoming algorithm update will focus on: Website Functionality User Experience &
- 7. What are the Ranking Factors for Page Experience Update ● Core Web Vitals ● Mobile Friendliness ● Intrusive Interstitial Guidelines ● Safe Browsing ● HTTPS
- 8. Core Web Vitals First introduced in May 2020 as a reporting feature in Search Console The 3 metrics currently in this report: ● LCP: This measures the point when the main content of the page has loaded, like an image or text block. The goal is to have the LCP load within 2.5 seconds or less. ● FID: Measures load responsiveness – the amount of time it takes for the page to respond to the user’s interaction. 100 milliseconds or less is a good FID score to aim for on your website. ● CLS: This metric measures visual stability and how often users experience unexpected layout shifts on a page. To provide a good user experience, the CLS score should be less than 0.1.
- 9. Mobile Friendliness With 50% of internet traffic coming from a mobile device, you need to make sure your website is optimized for mobile viewing. What can you do now? 1. Use tools to review how mobile-friendly a web page is 2. Ensure that website is responsive and functions well on mobile / tablet devices 3. Optimize mobile site speed
- 10. Intrusive Interstitial Guidelines AVOID intrusive ads and interstitials on mobile websites. While these kinds of ads may bring in sales, they can actually hurt your website performance on mobile because they take up more space that can hinder the mobile experience.
- 11. Safe Browsing Google wants to create a safe browsing experience for users and also help webmasters flag and resolve security issues threatening their websites including: ● Malware ● Deceptive pages ● Harmful downloads ● Uncommon downloads
- 12. HTTPS In 2016, Google encouraged sites to make the transition from HTTP to HTTPS for added security for both the users and the site hosts. This has since become a common practice for most industries, not just websites in the healthcare or financial spaces. If you haven’t made that switch yet, now is the time!
- 13. How to Improve Website Performance and User Experience
- 14. Imagine patrons being invited to a restaurant by a friendly spokesperson...
- 15. ...and finding it like this “The world’s worst restaurant” Source
- 16. Well, this is what Google is trying to FIX (for the digital world) with the Page Experience Update.
- 17. Why care about user experience? - The External View What you offer? What Customer needs? USER EXPERIENCE <> CUSTOMER SATISFACTION
- 18. 1999 - 2008 2009 - 2018 Today - Beyond The Click Era Marketing success is measured through clicks and traffic. The KPI Era Marketers go beyond clicks with metrics like VTC and start to explore data-driven models for attribution. The Impact Era Tie marketing to revenue with deep insights into the journey and verify the touch points that lead to sales. Marketer’s (YOUR) goals have evolved Why care about customer experience? - The Internal View
- 19. Framework to improve website conversion/performance & user experience Research Tracking metrics and identifying what parts of conversion funnel need fixing Hypothesis Constructing educated hypothesis, based on your research Prioritize Planning and prioritizing your hypothesis Test Testing your hypothesis against the existing version of the website Measure/Learn Deploying the winning hypothesis and/or gathering learnings Understand Audience Behaviour Improve Audience CX Improve Conversions/Revenue
- 20. Understanding Audience Journey – Follow The Trail RESEARCH
- 21. Most commonly used methods to generate User insights Difficulty in generating insights Difficult Easy Value of insights Low High *Size of the bubble indicates the popularity or usage of the method
- 22. Once this update is completely rolled-out, User Experience will become a direct ranking factor. They key impact to note with this update:
- 23. Build a structured Hypothesis Based on Observations I believe Solution will address Problem for Audience and impact Goal by uplift % Evidence or Research that identifies a pattern or a problem that needs solving If you are just starting to test, then Audience is probably all visitors. But as you mature in optimization your audience is a subset Brings in accountability on what your team was trying to achieve HYPOTHESIS
- 24. What we use/recommend? Confidence Importance Ease How confident are you of achieving better experience for users / uplift in conversion rates from this change? How valuable are the audience you are changing this for? How Easy is it implement this change? Generally higher confidence can be achieved with high level of research Not just effort for design and dev, but also take into account how easy is it to get all stakeholders to agree to doing this For example a change which impacts the bottom of the funnel could be more important than a change that impact the on top of the funnel PRIORITIZE
- 25. Choose from Different Testing Types: A/B, Multivariate, and Split A/B Test Change any element or section of a webpage and test both versions. Split URL Test Test performances of separate URLs if the landing pages are significantly different. Multivariate Test Run tests on multiple variation combinations together. TEST
- 26. Good: Lift Do your leading indicators correlate with aggregated revenue lift? (i.e., Are you beating your benchmarks?) Are your user experience improvement efforts working? Better: Influence Do your lagging indicators correlate with aggregated revenue lift? (i.e., Are you beating your benchmarks?) Best: Revenue Attribution Connect your results to revenue attribution and directly draw the line to top line contribution MEASURE/LEARN
- 27. UNCOVER what your audience really wants PLAN growth roadmap & priorities based on your goals LEARN what drives growth by testing various experiences DELIGHT audience by implementing learnings across touchpoints CONTINUOUSLY REPEAT to achieve great user experience, website performance & hypergrowth TO SUM UP How to Improve Website Performance and User Experience?
- 28. How to Improve Your SEO Strategy for the Google Page Experience Update
- 29. E-A-T ● Expertise ● Authority ● Trustworthiness Every update maintains the importance of E-A- T to enhance the user experience of your website and its content. Action Items ● Accurate and factual information ● Authoritative and well-researched content (original content, case studies, etc.) ● Information produced or reviewed by an authoritative source within an industry 29
- 30. Content Creation Content Continues to be King! Action Items ● Content helps you establish E-A-T ● Keyword research ● Blog articles & in-depth resource guides ● FAQ & glossary pages ● Product/service specific landing pages
- 31. Repurpose Existing Content Take the time to update your existing content to stay up-to-date with new information and trends. You don’t have to create all content pieces from scratch. Action Items ● Find pieces you currently rank for and update them with the latest information ● Update product pages with new features and user data ● Take popular pieces and regularly check them to make sure data hasn’t become old news 31
- 32. Clean Up Deadweight Content Some content is impossible to update and becomes essentially useless. This is known as Deadweight Content. If it no longer serves your website, the user, is irrelevant to your business, or doesn’t perform well, GET RID OF IT! Action Items: ● Check analytics data (6 mo. to 1 year) on old content to see how it’s performed or if it’s generated sales. ● Segment which pages need repurposing, consolidation, or if it needs to be removed entirely. ● Removing irrelevant pages removes this excess weight taking up valuable crawl budget space.
- 33. Relevancy Improvements While not a direct ranking factor, relevancy makes good websites stand out, and are thus rank higher. Making your posts relevant helps the user experience. Action Items: ● How easy is it for searchers to find the answer to their question or search query? Make your content easy to understand. ● Do searchers leave your website with unanswered questions? Be sure to address them. ● Is the page just a huge blog of text? Include images, videos, and headings to break up walls of text to improve readability. 33
- 34. Page Design and Structure Long form articles are important for search engines, but can be hard to navigate. Enhance your page structure and design. Action Items: ● Organize content with headers (h1, h2, h3, etc.) ● Place images and other visual elements throughout the page ● Utilize bulleted and numbered lists ● Add internal links to take people to other valuable and relevant pages ● Use a call-to-action (CTA) to help increase lead gen ● Use anchor links for easy access
- 35. How will the Page Experience Update Impact Website Performance
- 36. What does this mean for you? Historically You competed on keywords, content, meta descriptions, technical SEO bits among other things - which will continue. Now You will compete on those items PLUS - Speed, safety, consistency (layout, visuals, format) & being less nudgy. This is just the first step in the overall web experience Google is trying to achieve. Eventually You will compete on all of the above factors, PLUS user experience as a whole (giving customers what they want, when they want and how they want it) - Google will eventually get there!
- 37. How will the Page Experience Update Impact Website Performance? Well, in the long run - it will have a positive impact. Why? ● Essentially what Google has done is create a structure and framework to compel brands to focus on user experience. ● In essence, Google is trying to make it as objective as possible - which is a good thing. ● It's a win-win. We are all consumers too. Better experience saves time, effort, money - makes us happy! This will make us marketers more disciplined with UX. The more we care about this and give a great experience, the better the ranking, traffic, conversions, revenue. CAUTION: If you don’t act on this now - it could lead to a negative impact on your page rankings and all downstream metrics once the update is rolled out.
- 38. Small changes that can have high impact
- 39. Third party codes ● Time to dig deeper into all 3rd party codes you have installed on your website ● Identify the ones that are slowing your website down ○ Most vendors should optimize their codes for speed ○ If not, change the vendor/tool ● Identify non critical ones ○ Tools that you have not used in a long time or aren’t adding any value - take them off
- 40. Lazy Loading Ensure you have lazy loading correctly set up
- 41. Optimize images with next-gen formats like WebP Use a good CDN for image delivery
- 42. Optimize your rendering framework ● Client side vs server side vs hybrid / Pre-rendering ● Work with your developers to understand the best approach for your site structure ● Goal is to optimize first time loading, all subsequent loading and also ensure that crawlers are able to make sense of your website CLIENT SIDE RENDERING SERVER SIDE RENDERING PRE-RENDERING
- 43. Experimentation ● Collect user behaviour data, A/B test variations based on that - improve UX ● With Google page experience update. Until there is clarity on what works: ○ There are many unknowns. There is too much to tweak. Best way to approach this is by building a culture of experimentation. Apply changes and monitor the change in rankings. Learn and tweak again as needed. Repeat.
- 44. VWO resources ● ROI of Experimentation ● VWO Performance Improvement Updates to reduce impact on Google PageSpeed score https://vwo.com/ebooks/key-conversion- optimization-pillars/
- 45. Questions? We’re here to help! Kristine Pratt Director of Content Maja Teagle SEO Manager
- 46. Google Page Experience Update Resources Boostability.com/resources Downloads tab Boostability.com/content
- 47. Need help with your SEO? Reach out to us! Visit boostability.com or call 800-261-1537 RSVP / Watch: boostability.com/search-sessions/