Google Search’s Algorithm Updates: What you need to know

In May, Google is making updates to how it evaluates websites and ranks them. A system of metrics, now called Core Web Vitals, will act as proxies to measure how users perceive the experience of interacting with a web page, and in turn influence a site's ranking in Google Search. 

1. What are core web vitals? 

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LCP: Largest Contentful Paint. This measures how long it takes to load the largest piece of content on the page, it looks at the render time of the largest visible image or text block. If your site has large size content like a video, or high resolution images, these could hurt your LCP metric. 

FID: First Input Delay. This measures load responsiveness because it quantifies the experience users feel when trying to interact with unresponsive pages. When we open a page, we want to begin interacting right away by clicking on a button, scrolling through, etc. This metric measures how long the delay is before the page begins processing these user interaction inputs, and how satisfied the user experience is based on the delay. 

CLS: Cumulative Layout Shift. Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) is a user-centric metric for measuring visual stability because it helps quantify how often users experience unexpected layout shifts—a low CLS helps ensure that the page is delightful. Here's a video that demonstrates the poor user experience that includes a lot of layout shifts as the page loads.

2. What does this mean for brands? 

It's important for brands to begin optimizing their site in order to improve or at least not lose their ranking in Google Search. Brands should set up their Google Search Console tool to audit their core web vitals and work on areas of improvement suggested. Brands should continue to monitor traffic volume driven from organic search as the changes roll out. 

Google defines “good” core web vitals performance as measuring in the 75th percentile of page loads. Mobile searches are measured separately from desktop searches due to the dramatic differences in formatting, data speeds, and processing power. For each metric, on either mobile or desktop, the 75th percentile measures at:

• LCP: 2.5 seconds

  • Enabling lazy loading and optimizing media files on site will help improve this metric.

• FID: 100 milliseconds

  • While core web vitals metrics are measured in the 75th percentile, for FID specifically, looking into the 95th - 99th percentile will help you hone in on areas that need the most attention and will drive the most immediate impact. 

• CLS: 0.1

  • Avoid having images, ads, embeds, and iframes without dimensions on the site and always including width and height attributes will help improving this metric.