Core Web Vitals for SEO: An Overview

There are a great many things that go into designing a webpage that offers a good user experience. How fast the page loads and how easy it is to interact with the page are just a couple. And the list is constantly evolving.

Google defines the core elements of a webpage that enhance user experience as “core web vitals.” Core web vitals were introduced in Google’s page experience ranking updateWhat Are Core Web Vitals?

Core web vitals are a series of signals that help assess the usability of a webpage. These “vital signs” are page quality signals that contribute to a good user experience. And that’s good for SEO.

Core web vitals cover things like page load time, responsiveness and the visual stability of content. Google’s current set of core web vitals includes:

• Largest contentful paint (LCP): LCP measures how fast the largest image or text block renders on the webpage. And Google recommends that it happen within the first 2.5 seconds.
• First input delay (FID): FID measures load responsiveness. This refers to how quickly a webpage loads and executes so that the user can interact with the page.
• Cumulative layout shift (CLS): CLS measures unexpected layout shifts on a webpage. One example is when a button or link shifts on the webpage, causing a person to click on something other than what they wanted.

Each of these core web vitals has specific thresholds that your webpages must meet at least 75% of the time, which I’ll go into in more detail in future articles. Doing so can earn your webpage a slight ranking boost.

Image credit: Web Vitals, Google Developers

You can expect the core web vitals to evolve over time, but not without warning. According to Google:

… Core Web Vitals represent the best available signals developers have today to measure quality of experience across the web, but these signals are not perfect and future improvements or additions should be expected. … developers should expect the definitions and thresholds of the Core Web Vitals to be stable, and updates to have prior notice and a predictable, annual cadence.

How Might Core Web Vitals Impact SEO and Rankings?

Core web vitals help ensure the user experience with your site is fast, responsive and smooth. This is already a goal of a good SEO strategy.

• LCP is one way to measure that webpages load fast. It helps your website visitors have a good user experience and stay on your site.
• FID plays into another good SEO strategy, to keep visitors on your site.
• CLS helps ensure that the experience is smooth for your mobile users, a key SEO strategy.

Google has not yet specified what percentage of rankings the new page experience signal is impacting. We also haven’t heard exactly how core web vitals play into the overall page experience ranking update either. But we do know that earning “good” scores can help your rankings. According to John Mueller, page experience “is a ranking factor, and it’s more than a tie-breaker, but it also doesn’t replace relevance.”

Search Engine Land spoke to a Google rep and reported that Google would not be discussing “how much each factor is weighted,” but that “great content with a poor page experience can still rank highly in Google search.”

Perhaps a different view will help: If your site is slow, it cannot respond quickly to a voice search request. Will voice search become increasingly important? Of course. So overall speed is vital going forward.

It’s also suspected that Google’s AI, RankBrain, takes into account how users engage with the search results. RankBrain’s goal is to better interpret search queries and serve the most relevant search results. Specifically, RankBrain may look at the time spent engaging with a webpage when accessed from the search results.

Keep in mind that a fast site finds favor in Google’s eyes. It creates a better user experience, and that’s good for all. For that reason, page speed has been a ranking factor for years. The most recent news on this was the “speed update” for mobile that rolled out in 2018. The page experience update just makes that more granular, with many different metrics being tracked.

Core web vitals help ensure users are happy and stay on your site. This, in turn, can impact rankings. See an earlier article I wrote on SEO and the user experience.

Core Web Vitals and the ‘Fast Page’ Label

Is your website ready to pass the thresholds for core web vitals? If not, you’re not alone.

According to research by Screaming Frog published in August 2020, only 12% of mobile and 13% of desktop results passed the assessment.

A more recent study by Searchmetrics found even worse results. Less than 4% of the two million URLs they checked could pass all of the core web vitals tests!

It’s likely that Google knows the work that is ahead of website publishers, which explains why the search engine announced it a year in advance. Google also announced an added incentive: a “fast page” label that would be added to search results on Chrome for Android, starting in Chrome 85 Beta.

How can you earn that label for your webpages? Google says that “links to pages that have historically met or exceeded all metrics thresholds for the core web vitals” get the label.

(While Google says “all” core web vitals, it’s unclear how cumulative layout shift factors into the fast page label.)

That means that even though Google said back in May 2020 that “there is no immediate need to take action,” it tried to make core web vitals a little more enticing to get a head start on.

That’s because sites with a “fast page” label in the results can potentially garner more clicks. This is reminiscent of the “mobile-friendly” labels Google created back in 2014, when it wanted website publishers to start putting mobile users first.

More on Core Web Vitals

As we continue our series on core web vitals, I’ll highlight each of the factors — LCP, FIC and CLS — and include frequently asked questions on how to prepare for the coming page experience update.

You can find out about each page experience factor in our series:

1. What’s the Page Experience Update?
2. How to Make a Mobile-Friendly Site
3. Intrusive Interstitials & Why They’re Bad for SEO
4. HTTPS for Users and Ranking
5. Core Web Vitals Overview
6. Core Web Vitals: LCP (Largest Contentful Paint)
7. Core Web Vitals: FID (First Input Delay)
8. Core Web Vitals: CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift)

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Bruce Clay is founder and president of Bruce Clay Inc., a global digital marketing firm providing search engine optimization, pay-per-click, social media marketing, SEO-friendly web architecture, and SEO tools and education. Connect with him on LinkedIn or through the BruceClay.com website.

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