Core Web Vitals

What is Core Web Vitals?

You ever come across an instance where one page loaded better than another? Probably yes, we’ve all been there. The next thing you might have done was close the unloaded page and get on with your job. But did you wonder what caused the variation in the loading time? Probably yes.

So, what exactly did happen? It is something called the Core Web Vitals by Google. These core web vitals are the factors that Google considers imperative for an overall well-rounded user experience. Any problem in these, and your page experience goes for a toss, your SEO starts to lose its credibility, and your website starts losing ranks.

What are the 3 Core Web Vitals?

When you create your website, you put content on it. The content is made for a target audience that comprises the ICP or the ideal customer profile. These are the group of people who are most likely to engage with your website and probably even drive business for you.

So, your overall website experience becomes of utmost importance to the people in the target audience. Among the various parameters of the website, three metrics are considered of utmost importance as the core web vitals. They are:

LCP- Largest Contentful Paint

Every webpage has an image that is critical for that page’s content. While LCP is often mistaken as the time to load the element, LCP is basically the most prominent page element. If that element loads faster, the overall vital speed of the website will automatically improve, which further enhances the user experience.
FID- First Input Delay

There are instances when a page seems like it has been loaded, but nothing happens when you click on any element or a CTA. This is called input delay. So, the longer it takes for the web page to respond to the user’s first interaction with the webpage, the worse it is for your webpage’s credibility.
CLS- Cumulative Layout Shift

This is the most recent addition but is quite a useful one. On some web pages, you might have noticed that while it is loading all the elements, the text loads first while the images take longer. And when the images have loaded, the content shifts from its place. This is called layout shift.

The cumulative layout shift is a metric that measures how many times your layout shifts before the page is fully loaded. The higher the number of shifts, the lesser is your Google Page Score.

How do Core Web Impact SEO?

Five years ago, SEO used to be just keywords, phrases, and callsigns for getting your content ranked. Bombarding your article with the target keywords was one of the most common approaches to get rankings. However, since May 2020, Google has started to pay more attention to user experience.

This involved deploying the BERT algorithm, the page experience update, and the Core Web Vitals July 2021 update. So, how do Core web vitals relate to SEO? Here’s are the top 3 ways SEO is impacted:

SEO is merged with Page Experience

The entire point of SEO is to improve your rankings on Google search results organically to drive more traffic. However, with the updates, Google now considers the core web vitals essential in ranking an article.

So, good SEO with problematic Core web vitals spell lower rankings overall.
Problematic Page Experience arises from problematic core web vitals

The direct impact of core web vitals is on the user experience for that webpage. If your LCP takes too long to load, you have a long FID, or the number of CLS is high, your page experience automatically goes to the dogs as the user will not stay for long. With an average of just 5.6 seconds spent on a webpage, you don’t have a lot of room for error.

So, as the page experience drops, the SEO also goes for a toss. And in some cases, you might be hit with a penalty that can severely damage your domain score, page score, and your SEO as well.
Lower engagement metrics due to back end problems

Google improves the page score of a webpage when it sees the traffic for a website and its off-page SEO metrics. However, if those metrics cannot instill trust in the users, your on-page SEO will automatically not yield the same results. As a result, your rankings will start to drop.

Conclusion- Is optimization of Core Web Vitals important??

YES, ABSOLUTELY! While they might seem like small things that form the nitty-gritty details of a webpage, Core Web Vitals have become very relevant today. So, if you want your website to rank high, drive more traffic, and accomplish online business goals, optimizing your core websites is imperative.

Krivy helps you gain the most from these core web vitals. Let us know your pain points, and our experts will guide you to your objective with the best core web vital strategies!