How To Get Your Website Ready for June Google Algorithm Update?
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Google has started assessing some technical elements of your website to gain a better understanding of your website's ‘Page Experience’, in other words, performance. This could spell bad news for your site-ranking if you are not prepared. No worries, we got you! Here is how to get the most of it...
Page Experience
Google has announced the rollout of the page experience update, specifically the ranking change from May 2021 to be a gradual rollout that won’t start until mid-June 2021 and won’t be fully released until the end of August. Now, there are more things to take note of if you want your website to rank well. Let’s look closer at the updates and the outcome of it in this blog post.
Google will start assessing some technical elements of your website to gain a better understanding of your website's ‘Page Experience’, in other words, performance.
This could spell bad news for your site-ranking if you are not prepared.
No worries we got you!
Even though the updates are new, they are based on the already existing signals Google has mentioned many times before, the difference is that now they are officially included into the set of signals that define how your website is ranked
If you pass their screening, the algorithm will give you an organic boost in rankings and with that you can naturally expect a traffic increase and ultimately, a conversion rate improvement.
Otherwise, if you fail the test, your points will be diminished and the new update will work against you.
Let's go through the new technical updates and how you can leverage them to ensure you are prepared for the upcoming changes.
Three signals for Core Web Vitals
Ladies and gentleman here they are, the three specific technical elements (‘signals’) that Google refers to these as Core Web Vitals, and which will start being assessed this May:
Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)
Page Load Speed - How fast does your website load? This includes all of your images, videos and graphics on the website. Crawlers tend to check everything, especially media files which are bigger in size.
LCP may not be the main ranking signal by authority, however it influences user experience directly and with that bounce rate and monthly traffic. This makes it far more important than Google is telling it.
LCP can make or break your ranks, so make sure you pay close attention to it.
Next to media files, your page speed can be influenced by your server time, your CSS, JavaScript and client-side rendering.
First Input Delay (FIP)
Interactivity - How long do your users have to wait to interact with content, e.g. forms, on your website?
When a user clicks on something, a button or a JavaScript event, how fast can the browser start to process that and produce a result?
Nobody likes waiting around for a button to work.
We want results and we want them now!
Digital experiences are in big chunks created by the FIP. They tell us how much the brand is valuing their customers/visitors, and how much they are investing in creating a great experience for them.
Digital experiences are the main reason behind the increased conversion rate and more importantly, the creation of life long customers.
Visitors that return to your website are the ones telling you that they enjoyed the experience and want more.
This is why Google appreciates FIP so much. It enables it to measure a possible quality of the digital experience provided by a certain domain.
Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)
Visual Stability - How visually stable is your website? Does it jump around as it’s loading content?
A layout shift occurs any time a visible element changes its position from one rendered frame to the next. (See below for details on how individual layout shift scores are calculated.)
Unexpected movement of page content usually happens because resources are loaded asynchronously or DOM elements get dynamically added to the page above existing content.
The culprit might be an image or video with unknown dimensions, a font that renders larger or smaller than its fallback, or a third-party ad or widget that dynamically resizes itself.
In most of the cases the image sizes make this mess because they are not properly defined in HTML.
Google's own studies show that for pages that meet these thresholds of Core Web Vitals, visitors are 24% less likely to abandon the site.
How to leverage the new Google Update in May
Get ready for it!
As you may have noticed, loading speed may be the highest ranking factor among others in the May update.
So it’s easy - optimize for speed.
If you are someone who has worked with SEO for a long time, you are probably thinking: “But my site is already optimized enough… I think.”
Check! And optimize better.
Use the performance report made by Cloudimage to check every single image on your web site!
Most used website speed checker is Google page speed. However, this tool does not give you a detailed overview of how fast your media files are being loaded, therefore checking it in other places will give you in depth knowledge of what you need to work on.
Tips for Better Performance
As image and video optimization is our main expertise let us dive into that!
Images often make up 70%+ of page weight and how they load has a tangible impact on your page's layout.
Image Optimization
To ensure your images are not damaging your website ranking, you should ensure that they are optimized. Images should be served in modern, light file formats, such as WebP, or AVIF. This ensures image file sizes are as light as possible - meaning they can be delivered and loaded quickly.
If you still have any PNG/JPEG files, make sure to have them converted so that you can avoid negative points during the crawling.
Cloudimage.io enables you to do these conversions fast and with great accuracy, so if you need help do give it a go.
Deliver over CDNs
Moreover we would emphasize that the use of multi port Content Delivery Network (CDN) is becoming kind of a standard in the industry right now!
CDNs enable you to accelerate your content delivery speed all around the world, including China!
They are also quite favored by Google crawlers and are safe and secure to handle your content worldwide.
Responsive Websites
When a customer/end-user visits your website, the size of the image served should be automatically optimized for their device/container size.
If your images are not responsive, your website will be pushing image files that are unnecessarily large and this inefficiency will damage your site's ranking, alongside your end-user experience.
Leverage the HTML5 picture element to make images responsive to different screen sizes and make sure to test on different devices. Google will do it for you anyway but why not get ahead!
Stable Websites
Stable: your website should ideally utilize a combination of blur-hash and lazy loading.
Blur hash provides a graphically-pleasing, blurred version of your image whilst the full quality image loads, this prevents the page from jumping around as images take time to download.
Also, a quick win here would be that it's not that popular yet. Some of the biggest brands out there are still not utilizing the power of a Blur Hash.
You can find out why Blur Hash exists, how it works and what the steps to implementation look like, via this link.
Furthermore, lazy loading ensures that only the images within a defined scrollable range are loaded - i.e. not everything is loaded at once - this enables better page/network efficiency.
Chrome and Firefox both support lazy-loading with the loading attribute. This attribute can be added toimgelements, and also toiframeelements.
A value of lazy tells the browser to load the image immediately if it is in the viewport, and to fetch other images when the user scrolls near them.
Video Transcoding and Adaptive Streaming
Don’t forget the videos! Video Transcoding and Adaptive streaming can speed up your video delivery and keep your digital experience on the high note!
Dive into the magic of video transcoding in our latest blog and maximize your site optimization before the Google Update rolls out in May!
Outcome of Google Algorithm Update
Google’s main aim has always been to improve the experience of the users. From priortizing page load time and to ensuring mobile-friendliness, and now the introduction of Core Web Vitals, they have continually pushed for better user experiences.
How will it impact your SEO?
This algorithm update will be severe for websites that initially have poor page experience. On the other hand, the majority of the websites that have good user experience don’t see as much impact at all. This is because, on top of the core web vitals, Google still considers other search ranking signals, such as the quality of the content within the website.
But what this means for marketers and website developers is that apart from creating high-quality content that correlates with users’ search intent and comprehensively addresses the topics, you should focus on improving Core Web Vitals metrics to boost your website’s organic performance.
Want to keep up with the trends in the world where speed is everything? Make sure to subscribe to our newsletter and schedule a free demo if you need help with any of the points mentioned above.
