Google Web Vitals & Foundational SEO

Who hasn’t heard of keywords and their importance in foundational SEO? But just when you thought it was safe to stack keywords in your alt text, the game is changing. Other factors that you never thought were in your hands suddenly loom large in the SEO world. If page loading speed hasn’t come up in your cocktail conversation, you haven’t been chatting with Google. Google Web Vitals helps you look at page speed, and our experts at Art of Strategy Consulting can help with the rest.

Google Web Vitals

A core web vitals report can, according to Google, “The Core Web Vitals report shows how your pages perform, based on real-world usage data (sometimes called field data). Why page performance matters? Longer page load times have a severe effect on bounce rates. For example: If page load time increases from 1 second to 3 seconds, bounce rate increases 32%. If page load time increases from 1 second to 6 seconds, bounce rate increases by 106%.”

What’s in the Report?

Also, according to Google, “The Core Web Vitals report shows URL performance grouped by status, metric type, and URL group (groups of similar web pages). Only indexed URLs can appear in this report. The URLs shown are the actual URLs for which data was recorded (that is, data is not assigned only to a page’s canonical URL, as it is in most other reports). The report is based on three metrics: LCP, FID, and CLS. If a URL does not have a minimum amount of reporting data for any of these metrics, it is omitted from the report. Once a URL has a threshold amount of data for any metric, the page status is the status of its most poorly performing metric.”

Poor, Need improvement, or Good

Measurements of the LCP (largest contentful paint) “The amount of time to render the largest content element visible in the viewport, from when the user requests the URL.”, FID (first input delay) The time from when a user first interacts with your page (when they clicked a link, tapped on a button, and so on) to the time when the browser responds to that interaction.” and CLS (cumulative layout shift) “CLS measures the sum total of all individual layout shift scores for every unexpected layout shift that occurs during the entire lifespan of the page.” tell a good deal about the user experience for your page, and your status metrics tell how your page is doing.

As foundational SEO progresses, the waters around the tech get a little deeper. So be prepared with help from our experts at AoS for your foundational SEO needs.