Don’t worry, the Page Experience algorithm update isn’t rolling out until 2021 according to Google. With Covid- 19, Google gave us a notice on the algorithm update and what it all means… This gives us all enough time to update your website to avoid traffic dropping.
Let’s jump in, what’s the new Google Page Experience update and what can you do to be ready for it?
The new google Page Experience
Let’s have Google introduce it.
“The page experience signal measures aspects of how users perceive the experience of interacting with a web page. Optimising for these factors makes the web more delightful for users across all web browsers and surfaces, and helps sites evolve towards user expectations on mobile. We believe this will contribute to business success on the web as users grow more engaged and can transact with less friction".”
Or simplified, Google are looking at how usable your website is.
Here’s an example of what they don’t want…
What Google is showing above, the user was simply trying to click on “No, go back”, but because an install bar popup up at the top, it pushed the whole page down and caused the user to accidentally click on “Yes, place my order.”
The reason for this update is simple, Google wants to make sure that sites that rank at the top are not creating terrible user experience.
To make this even more simple, this page experience update is stating that user-friendly sites will rank higher than sites that aren’t user friendly.
But this simple change is the start of a big shift when it comes to SEO.
What makes this update important?
What websites do you think Google wants to rank at the top of page one? Let’s take a guess, sites with the best backlinks? Sites with the buttoned up on page code?.. It’s none of those, actually.
Google wants to rank the sites at the top of page one that users love the most. Who?
When you want to buy trainers, what brand comes to mind? Nike?
Want a credit card? First thoughts will be Visa, American Express, or Mastercard.
This is why brand searches (Those searching your brand name and clicking on your website) impact rankings, which is without a doubt one of the most important SEO lessons.
As your brand grows, your SEO traffic will naturally but that’s known and expected seeing as it’s been part of Google’s algorithm for years now. Most websites don’t have large brands and Google knows that. So, if you don’t have one, you can still rank high.
What Google is doing is adapting its algorithm to more closely align with the mission of showing the sites first that users love the most. Yes, brand queries are certainly one of the ways they can do this, but user experience is another metric.
Over the next few years, we can be confident that you will see many algorithm updates focusing on user experience.
That’s great but how do you go about optimising your user experience?
Well, it begins with each page
If you look at the original article Google posted about the future algorithm change, they emphasise “page experience” or “website experience.”
This doesn’t mean that your whole website shouldn’t have a good user experience, but instead, it seems Google are going to focus on their algorithm from a page-level basis.
If you have a few pages on your websites that have a bad user experience, but the rest your website is good, it doesn’t make sense for Google to reduce the rankings of your whole site, especially if the majority of pages provide a better experience than your competition.
Optimise website speed and reduce 400 errors
It’s simple, the faster your website loads the better experience you’ll have.
Here’s a free way to check your site speed and enter your URL. You’ll receive two important aspects that impacts user experience. In the health checkbox, you’ll want to make sure there are no broken pages. Broken pages create bad experiences.
In the site speed box, you’ll see the load time of your site. The faster your site loads the better. Try to get your website load time for both desktop and mobile under 3 seconds. Ideally you should be in the 1-second range.
Check how your site experience compares to competitors
You may think you have an amazing user experience, but does it compared to your competition?
Check out their top 50 pages, you can do this for free using websites such as Neil Patel. Look at the user experience of each of those pages.
Ask yourself: What are they doing? How does their content quality compare to yours? What are the differences between their website compared to yours?
Check out each page of your competitors that ranks, on Neil Patel, click on “View All” under the “Est. Visits” heading. This will show you all of the keywords each page ranks for.
When you are comparing your competitors user experience, bare in mind how users who search for any of those keywords will feel about the landing page. This will give you an idea of what you need to do in order to compete for rankings.
Remember, your goal should never be to match your competition, it should always be to beat your competition.
Check in on your design
Remember the video, above of what Google doesn’t want? Where the user tried to click on “No, go back” instead of “Yes, place my order” due to design issues.
Your website most likely has usability issues. The way you find usability issues is through heatmaps. Find out usability issues by completing Crazy Egg test on your site.
After your Crazy Egg test, install a tracking script.
Once you have setup a tracking script, it usually takes at least a day to see results, if not a bit longer. It depends on your traffic. If you get thousands of visitors to your site each day you’ll see results within a few hours.
After you set up your test and it has been a few days, log back into Crazy Egg and click on Snapshots in the sidebar. Once you are there you will see a list of snapshots you have created.
Click on any of your snapshots and you’ll see a heatmap of how people are engaging with your web page.
What’s cool about snapshots is they show you every single click, or even scroll that people take.
Speaking hypothetical and from experience - You’ll notice issues such as an image on the page being clicked but there’s an issue… can you guess what it is? Potentially clicking on images where nothing happens. But for all of the users who click on those images, it means that they believe they are clickable and that something should happen when they click on them.
An easy fix for me is to make them clickable and when a user clicks take them to a page that ties in nicely.
Once you make the fixes to your page, you will want to re-run a new Crazy Egg snapshot on the same page to see if the changes helped improve the user experience.
Conclusion
User experience is going to be more and more important over time. If you love a site and everyone else loves that site, Google will eventually want to make sure that the site ranks high.
On the other side, if everyone feels a website has a terrible user experience, then Google won’t rank that website as high in the long run.
Just like any algorithm update Google does, expect to see multiple revisions over time. As they learn, they adapt to make their algorithms more effective over time.
But what is unique about this update is you have advanced notice, which is nice. So, take the opportunity and fix any usability issues you may have.
