GOOGLE CORE WEB VITALS AND HOW THEY AFFECT THE RANKING OF YOUR SITE

February 18, 2021

The way in which Google determines the positioning of each website has evolved over time, incorporating different factors and determining rules today. This is where Core Web Vitals come into the picture, promising to be one of these fundamental aspects of your site’s SEO.

If you want to know more about these vital metrics for your website, you cannot stop reading the information that this text has for you.

What are Core Web Vitals and when do they go into effect?

These elements are known to be a set of Google metrics that aim to examine the UX (user experience) design of a website. That is to say, its task is to analyze the loading time, as well as the interactivity of the page and the performance of the visual elements. These factors play a fundamental role when positioning a website in the Google results sheet.

Currently, Core Web Vitals are made up of three aspects: LCP or content loading, FID or site interactivity, and visual element stability or CLS.

Regarding their validity, it was expected that these metrics and their new update would be implemented during the year 2020. However, due to the pandemic, it was considered that the most prudent thing was to postpone it until the following year. Therefore, the webvitals will make their entry very soon in this 2021.

How to optimize Core Web Vitals?

As you read earlier, Core Web Vitals focus on three fundamentals: content loading, visual performance, and page interactivity.

To improve the metrics of your page, you need to understand what elements each of these webvitals focus on and thus be able to optimize them.

1. Loading o LCP (Largest Contentful Paint)

The first element to analyze is the LCP or Loading, which is nothing more than the time it takes to load the most extensive or most relevant content. Taking into account the time it takes to load the heaviest file from the moment the page is entered (text or image).

For example, imagine that you access a blog post, where all the elements have managed to load except the cover image. If it turns out that this is the heaviest content on that page, the site’s LCP will be high.

On the other hand, if the opposite happens, and the heaviest element loads first above other less heavy ones, the metric of this webvitals will be low.

If you want to achieve a good LCP statistic, it is important that the elements of your site load as quickly as possible. To know which ones you should optimize, you need to know which are the factors that Largest Contentful Paint measures:

Items marked as.

The elements immersed in other elements.

Items marked as

2. Interactividad o FID (First Input Delay)

This second factor of Core Web Vitals focuses on the interactivity of the page, that is, the time it takes for an element to react when it is clicked. It bears a certain relationship with the previous element, since it bases its metric on the same formula.

For example, imagine that you enter a website to book flights, and one of its sections redirects you to another page where you can book that trip. The time of the FID will be measured from when this element is pressed, until the web manages to react and redirect you to that place.

In this sense, in order to optimize the FID time, you must consider all the HTML elements that are native to your website. That is, those that must wait for the tasks in the main thread to finish before responding to user actions. Some of these can be:

Check box
Text fields
Elements,

3. Estabilidad visual o CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift)

Finally, we have the CLS or visual stability, and that also has a certain relationship with the previous webvitals. This, as its name indicates in Spanish, makes a measurement of the graphic stability of the site.

This Core Web Vitals from Google is responsible for measuring the displacement distance of the visual elements that appear as the page loads. For example, when you enter a blog post where the text, images or other objects change places after a few seconds.

The CLS metric will depend on how much these elements were scrolled, from the initial point where they appear until the web is finished loading.

The relationship with the rest of the UX design statistics is obvious. The CLS being proportional to the time it takes for the heaviest elements to appear and readjust the dimensions.

3. Is your content of quality?

You can never forget one of the most important parts of an SEO audit, and that is to review the written content of your website.

The rules for an entry to be considered notable by Google are simple, the most important being its value or contribution. If this text is repetitive, ambiguous or seems taken from another page, the search engine will consider it as not very relevant, and it will go to the bottom of the SERPs.

On the other hand, if you manage to upload true quality content to your site, the results will be quite beneficial for you. In this regard, it is also important to remember that:

The keywords must be well distributed in the text.
There is no specific formula for the use of keywords, so try not to saturate the text with a single keyword.
Following the previous point, the use of synonyms or semantic variations help a lot in positioning.
The images are worth gold, as well as the infographics or any visual support that you can contribute to your post.

If during your review you find that your entries do not meet these general conditions, you may have to rewrite or optimize them.

Can I measure and optimize Web Vitals with Google Search Console?

If you have a Google Search Console account, you can access statistics related to Core Web Vitals for your domain. This tool can show you relevant information regarding these metrics, and you can make the necessary changes to optimize them as much as possible.

You can get this data by accessing from the left bar of the Search Console, in the option that says “Best” and then in “Main web metrics”. From here you can select “Open report” and see the analysis of your webvitals in greater detail.