What this means for your business’s website

Essentially, Google is looking at more factors to ensure websites with a better user experience get better rankings. Google’s algorithms assess many factors of a website to determine its rank in search results. These factors are known as “ranking signals”. 

Aside from assessing the relevance of your content to search keywords and metadata, Google’s new “Page Experience” metrics will assess mobile friendliness, the presence of pop-ups (intrusive interstitials), safe browsing, security, and other elements that determine how pleasant your website experience is for your users. 

“Core Web Vitals” go beyond Page Experience to assess page loading speed and how that affects interaction on different devices.

Bottom line: website standards for Google search ranking will be severely raised, and any website that doesn’t anticipate and account for these standards will suffer in search ranking. If your competitor has a better user experience, chances are they will show in search results before you.

How you can prepare and benefit

Luckily, Google offers many tools to help you assess the quality of your website. And because they won’t impose these new ranking factors until May 2021, there is time to get your website up to par for the new standards.

The best thing you can do is hire an experienced SEO professional or web developer to conduct a full audit and assessment of your website and identify where you can improve to meet Google's new standards.

Fixing these issues will help you win Google’s favour over your competitors and work wonders for your ranking when Google makes these updates in May.