Page site optimisation has always been a very minor ranking element that SEO professionals have never taken seriously. It was important, but not as much as traditional on-site SEO and link development. However, things move quickly in the SEO realm. The current SEO company London trends suggest that Google seeks to humanise its search engine by focusing its ranking algorithm toward indicators like, you know it, page site optimisation, with the advent of BERT and MUM. Links and tags are important — and will be for as far as we can see — but they aren’t the only things to keep an eye on. Google introduced this new measure a major feature of the Page Experience Update, which launched in 2020.
Page experience is defined by Google, a set of indicators that assess how people evaluate the experience of engaging with a web page outside its sheer information value,” according to Wikipedia.
Let’s be clear: Google has no means of understanding how people see a web page (though Elon Musk’s Neuralink may soon change that). Instead, they make informed assumptions based on four variables that correspond with a page’s experience.
- LCP (Largest Contentful Paint): Loading performance is measured. After a page begins to load, Google advises aiming for an LCP of less than 2.5 seconds.
- Interactivity is measured by the First Input Delay (FID). A FID of less than 100 milliseconds is recommended by Google.
- CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift) is a visual stability metric. A CLS score of less than 0.1 is recommended by Google.
Here are a few things you can do to improve page performance and get more conversions:
- Reduce the amount of code on your website that isn’t essential.
- Defer the execution of JavaScript.
- Choose the correct hosting plan for your needs to reduce server response time.
- Browser caching should be enabled.
- Compression should be enabled.
- Reduce page size by 30-40% by compressing pictures.
After you’ve improved your site’s performance, make sure it fits the following three requirements for a great page experience:
- Convert your website to a mobile-friendly format.
- Invest in an HTTPS certificate for the website.
- Remove any unwanted pop-ups (those used to create an email list are unlikely to be troublesome; those that start new tabs or windows are).
Dwell Time Should Be Increased
The influence of user experience on Google’s ranking algorithm has long been a topic of debate in the SEO company London business. Yes, a clean scene, a quick load time, and a mobile experience are crucial, but until recently, none of these qualities had a significant impact on results. As you may expect, Google opted to flip the switch and make one component of the user experience crucial within their arsenal of ranking factors: dwell time.
Let’s use the following example to illustrate what we’re talking about:
A Google user types “SEO tactics” into the search bar, scroll through the top results and clicks on this page. The user concludes that they have discovered what they were seeking after four minutes and 25 seconds and returns to the SERPs to read additional sites.
The duration of their stay would be 4 minutes and 25 seconds. This benchmark does not make a significant difference to you or Google on its own. However, if Google believes that users spend more time on this page than on the sites of our competitors, they will conclude that our website is definitely doing something better.
