Content remains one of the fundamental parts seo (opens in a new tab). Search engines depend on someone having the answers to queries, so the symbiotic relationship is almost a necessity for both.
About the author
Rasa Sosnovskytė, Head of SEO and Growth Marketing at Oxylabs (opens in a new tab).
However, as the Internet advanced, engines had to figure out what to do when there was an overflow of query responses. The most popular Google searches probably have hundreds, if not thousands, of pages of well-written answers.
So Google decided on a multitude of other factors that are used to determine which result should be promoted the most. Many of them revolve around user experience. After all, if the answers are available across many pages, shouldn’t the winner be the one with the easiest access?
Go without Page Experience
While we generally believe that ranking factors are always applicable (and most of them are), Google has repeatedly indicated that there are cases where they are reduced. Based on publicly available information, personal experience and some data, it appears that the ranking factors will differ by:
Your Money or Life Pages (YMYL). Unlike the entries below, these pages supposedly have extremely high quality requirements rather than relaxing the ranking factors. However, it is not entirely uncommon to find the same website ranking multiple pages for a single query. Extremely niche queries. Some queries have so few answers that Google has no choice but to choose the results that match the intent. The experience of the page, basic web vitals, and other factors are often marginal to the main goal: to display an appropriate response.Clear intention. Apparently, at least according to John Mueller, there are cases where the intent is so transparent that the impact on the page experience is irrelevant. Your wording might suggest that these might be some transactional keywords or branded searches.
The third entry on the list might be a little new. The relationship of page experience to search intent was pointed out by John Mueller on February 25th Office hours (opens in a new tab): “[…] in situations where we have a clear, clear intent of the query, where we can understand that they really want to go to that website, from that point of view we can use the experience of the page as a ranking factor. .”
Mueller’s continuation gives us an idea of when the experience of the page starts to matter. He goes on to say that, “On the other hand, if all the content is very similar to the search results page, then using page experience probably helps a bit to understand which of these are fast pages. […] and which of these are less reasonable pages to show in search results.”
It goes without saying that almost every query we work with on a daily basis will be affected by the page experience. This can be a little annoying, especially for extremely large websites.
Focusing on the page experience
Before we go any further, it’s important to note that your page experience won’t drastically change your rankings, no matter how much you optimize. It should be considered as a second front of competition: it only matters if the content is as good as it can be.
Google itself has provided a handy chart for everything that goes on in Page Experience. They haven’t indicated which of these are the most impactful, but fixing just a few of them is unlikely to be a great idea.
(Image credit: Oxylabs)
Core Web Vitals (CWV) seems to be the most controversial and debated area. It includes three elements:
Larger Content Paint (LCP). Defined as the time it takes to render the largest image or text within the viewport, starting from when the page started to load. Keeping the 75th percentile of pages below 2.5 seconds is recommended for a “Good” rating. First Input Delay (FID). Defined as the time elapsed from the first user interaction to the start of event handlers. In words, from the first interaction to the first reaction. It is recommended to keep the 75th percentile of loads under 100ms.Cumulative design change (CLS). Defined as the measure of the largest burst of unexpected design changes, which move visual elements on the page. Before June 1, 2021, it was measured as the sum total of design changes (opens in a new tab). Google says the 75th percentile of CLS must be less than 0.1s (opens in a new tab) .
All three elements have recommendations issued by Google for best results. They are classified into three categories: “Good”, “Needs improvement” and “Slow”. Since Google has repeatedly stated that they use the status provided by Core Web Vitals, improving LCP, FID, CLS above “Good” is unlikely to do anything.
The remaining three will be self-explanatory, at least on a superficial level. HTTPS must be enabled, so it’s an on-off switch for ratings. Mobile-friendliness includes many best practices that make your website accessible. Intrusive interstitials should be completely disabled for best effect.
Also, there are some interesting caveats to discover, as John Mueller discussed repeatedly during several office hours. First, all these ratings are taken into account as a big picture. Optimization of a metric i leaving others behind is unlikely to be of any benefit (opens in a new tab). In the same episode, he even claims that ratings have no impact on indexing or budget tracking.
Finally, in a recent episode Mueller has revealed two interesting facts. One is that the overall page experience rating is only relevant for high-traffic pages. A portion of the traffic is displayed, usually including only the pages mentioned above, and the assessment applies to the entire website (opens in a new tab).
In cases where a website may have an unusually large amount of pages, they can be categorized. He gives an example of an e-commerce platform where they may have enough data to create a separate category of “product pages” for which page experience ratings may differ from the entire website.
As a result, focusing efforts on optimizing the page experience for a carefully selected number of pages can produce the same results with less resource usage.
conclusion
In general, page experience is a major ranking factor, but it might not have been as important as expected. It exists in cases where there is a lot of great content that provides an almost equally valuable answer to a query. Google then tries to optimize the user experience for the response, which is when the page experience comes in handy.
However, page experience optimizations have clearly defined limits. Not only is there no good reason to go beyond the “Good” evaluation criteria, but every page may not need to be optimized either. As a result, it’s best to pick the pages with the most traffic and start improving from there.
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