Rank Higher on Google | Digital Marketing Agency

What Is The New Google Algorithm Update?

As you may already know, there are over 200 Google ranking factors that are believed to be correlated with higher Google rankings.

At the top of the list, there have historically been things like quality backlinks and properly optimizing the architecture of your website for keywords you wish to rank for.

Those are the tools that Google used in order to help people find the best information available, which is their main goal.

And, those things are still important but now they have found a new way to determine how helpful a web page is to their users – page experience.

Since Google’s main goal is to offer the best experience to its users…

…then it only makes sense to look at the actual page experience of the websites it chooses to rank.

And now that’s about to happen.

What Is Page Experience?

Page experience signals are signals that measure how users perceive the experience of interacting with a web page.

Basically, Google wants to prioritize pages that offer the best experience to its users.

And according to Google, not only do they want to prioritize these pages in the search results…

…but they also want to highlight these experiences to help searchers understand what type of experience they can expect.

So it sounds like there may be some visual indicator on the search results that help users understand if a website has met Google’s criteria.

Google algorithm update

And while it’s not so clear how exactly this will look on the search results quite yet.

What is clear is that this update will impact virtually every website on their platform.

So let’s discuss what you need to know to stay relevant in Google’s search results.

How To Optimize Your Page Experience

The first thing we’d suggest is for you to sign-up for Google Search Console.

Google Search Console is free to use and has a “Page Experience” report that will tell you if your web pages have a good page experience or not.

Google algorithm update

According to Google, a good page experience is a URL that has:

good core web vitals,
no mobile issues,
secure, and
served over HTTPS

Things that can impact your core web vitals are things like page speed.

If it takes too long for people to load your website content, then this obviously isn’t a good page experience.

Things that can impact your mobile experience could be a number of things.

Google algorithm update

For instance, elements being too close together, the content being too wide, or the text just being too small to read on a mobile device.

These are all things that you can find out about your website for free by using the Google Search Console.

You can use the reports to identify specific opportunities to improve the page experience of your website.

And although this update has not officially rolled out yet, there is already a positive correlation between top websites and the SEO ROI they generated.

Just check out these case studies.

Vodafone improved its Page Experience and saw an 8% increase in sales.

Yahoo decreased the number of URLs with poor performance in the search console and saw a 15% jump in page views.

And Yelp saw a 15% improvement in their conversion rate after fixing technical issues with how their content loaded on their website.

And the list goes on and on from here.

Google algorithm update

The top websites are already working on their user experience, not only because it helps with SEO, but it ultimately helps them generate more customers.

Improving the experience of your website helps you show up and rank higher on Google.

While also, simultaneously helping you delight the people visiting your website and checking out what you have to offer.

With all of that said, you might be wondering… how important is Page Experience in comparison to other ranking signals?

Here’s what Google had to say about this.

“The page experience update introduces a new signal that our search algorithms will use alongside hundreds of other signals to determine the best content to show in response to a query.

Our systems will continue to prioritize pages with the best information overall, even if some aspects of page experience are subpar.

A good page experience doesn’t override having great, relevant content.”

Two big things here.

1. The pages with the BEST information overall will have priority.

This re-emphasizes that content is ultimately king in the algorithm.

If you have the best Page Experience with poor information, you will likely still not outperform your competitors.

2. The page experience is just ONE signal out of hundreds of other signals that Google uses.

So this single update likely won’t make or break your SEO standings alone.

However, if all else is equal with you and the site that is ranking above you, then we’d assume that the website with the better page experience will prevail.