Decoding Google Page Experience

Dubbed as one of the biggest updates the tech giant has ever rolled out, how will Google Page Experience affect brands trying to play in the online arena?

Once again, Google is shifting the goalposts as to how it reads and in turn makes judgements on how a user experiences your content – and whether it’s any good or not.

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One of the first changes surrounding the Google Page Experience update is the introduction of Core Web Vitals, which measure the following:

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) – Measures Loading Performance

The time interval between the start of a page load, to when the largest image or text block in a user’s viewport is fully rendered. While you might see the score change as your page loads and when content is visible, but the largest node is still in the backlog yet to be displayed.

First Input Delay (FID) –  Measures Interactivity

The amount of time it takes for a page to be ready for user interactivity. What this translates to is that as pages are assembling, Google measures how long it takes for the page to respond to clicks, scrolls, or keyboard input processing their corresponding event handlers.

Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) – Measures Visual Stability

The measured distance and fraction of the viewport which shifts due to DOM manipulation, or the lack of dimension attributes for major media elements. When we fail to define the dimensions for our hero images, i.e text on our pages first appears only to be displaced, this causes a disruptive content layout “shift” for our users.

Secondly, the use of “Field Data” will receive preference over “Lab Data”. The idea is that it will be a more accurate representation of someone’s experience, pulling field data from Chrome and Android users, and represents a departure from Google collecting this data themselves using Googlebot.

Finally, Google’s AMP framework, or Accelerated Mobile Pages, will be deprecated. The framework allowed developers to make a second version of their website page, meeting specific guidelines, so that Google could store a version of a website for fast loading. You may have experienced a publisher’s news story topping your search results, and that content was able to be shared. Now Google is replacing AMP and offering fast content delivery through signed exchanges, or agreements with Google that let the platform store a copy of your web page, to non-AMP pages.

Got all that? In a nutshell, the new Google Page Experience is a set of parameters to measure how user friendly your website is. The question is, how can online marketers continue to appease the Google Gods without losing their ranking?

Working With The New Google Page Experience

Other than the above fundamentals, there are also a few other more minor factors that Google Page Experience will measure based on your website, optimisation and content. Just a handful of these include a few of the usual suspects, such as if your website is mobile friendly, and your website’s overall security and safety.

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According to industry insiders, research indicates that the Google Page Experience rollout will most likely impact websites built on platforms such as Squarespace, Wix and Shopify. Google is a big fan of both optimised and dynamic content, so users of these platforms should be aware that as they contain areas in the code structure that are only accessible to developers, typically they feature more complicated content, yet are often unoptimised. Not only does this often increase page load times, but it also drains the resources of your browser – and that of Google.

In order to meet the new guidelines, brands and businesses should aim to ensure that their website loads as fast as possible without removing any valuable content that’s in place for your SEO score. If you need to restructure a few things, go for it – as retaining your hard earned position on the Google rankings is undeniably worth it.

Sourcing The Right Advice On Google Page Experience

In order to make sure that your website is going to pass all of the proverbial tests associated with the new Google Page Experience roll out, it’s going to need some solid infrastructure first.

Producing quality, consistent and on brand content that’s SEO and ultimately Google friendly takes time, effort, experience and resources – and you’re not alone if you can’t quite commit to that. Avoiding the use of content marketing altogether may actually be doing your brand a disservice, but thankfully – investing in a solid strategy has never been easier.

Here at Content Hive, producing top quality digital content is exactly what we do best. We have itemised a list of digital content services, and allocated credits next to each of these. This means that each month, you can use your credits with us to produce digital content such as social media posts, blog articles, videos and even animated Instagram stories.

We believe that this model means we can produce high quality content in faster than normal delivery times. It also means that because you have a monthly credit, you are going to want to make sure you use these up – and so do we – meaning that your digital content is always consistent.

If you aren’t quite sure where to start on your digital marketing journey and would like to speak to a professional, why not book a free discovery call with us at Content Hive today to discuss how we can get your brand buzzing online.

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