What Are Core Web Vitals & Why Should You Care?

MICHAEL:
Hi guys, Michael here. Do you want a second opinion on your SEO? Head to theseoshow.co and hit the link in the header. We'll take a look under the hood at your SEO, your competitors and your market and tell you how you can improve. All right, let's get into the show.

INTRO: It's time for the SEO show, where a couple of nerds talk search engine optimization so you can learn to compete in Google and grow your business online. Now, here's your hosts, Michael and Arthur.

MICHAEL: Hello and welcome to the SEO show. I'm Michael, one of your co-hosts and I'm joined by Arthur, another of your co-hosts.

ARTHUR: How you going Arthur? I'm doing very, very well. It's good to be back in the studio. It is. Yes. Why would you say it's good?

MICHAEL: Just a little bit of normality. Yeah. You have to get in your car, drive to a little room, all those kilometers away from your house to do what we've been doing at home. It's worse for you. Worse for me, but you know what? It's much better in person with all our gear.

ARTHUR: Nice microphones, all the recording equipment.

MICHAEL: Yeah. It feels more professional.

ARTHUR: Definitely. I hope it sounds more professional.

MICHAEL: I think so. Probably sounds, I don't know if the contents are that professional, but we'll let you be the judge of that and the, uh, the reviews and the comments, wherever you get your podcasts. But look, what we're talking about today is very professional when we're on the point of professionalism, because we're talking about core web vitals. So this is a relatively big thing in the SEO world. And we haven't really spoken about it on the show so far. You know, we've touched on it here and there, but you know, in the early days of the show, we were doing a lot of the very basic stuff. So we didn't want to be talking about cumulative layout shifts and all that sort of stuff so early on. But today is the day. Today is the day we're getting stuck into core web vitals. So what are they and why should you care?

ARTHUR: Are you asking me?

MICHAEL: Or are you asking the audience? I was just letting it hang there for a second while people digest it and thought, you know, what is it? Well, what is it? That's a good question.

ARTHUR: What would you say? Do you want to give it a go? Well, I was going to say, let's start with a bit of history. So I guess historically, you know, there were kind of three pillars of SEO. So you had your authority, your onsite content and your technical, I guess it's kind of as technical, but really no one, no one really thought about user experience. So there was a lot of emphasis and things like link building and content, you know, onsite SEO, but no one really thought about, you know, metrics related to user experience. So this is where Core Web Vitals kind of comes in. So was it last year or maybe a bit longer?

MICHAEL: Well, they were sort of talking about it for a long time in the lead up.

ARTHUR: Like I know- This last year has just been a blur so I can't remember. My concept of time is just completely out of whack, yeah.

MICHAEL: Well, it is a ranking factor as of June, like basically about the time we went into lockdown here was when it was going into the algorithm. Last year. This year. 21. Yes. Sorry, man.

ARTHUR: I'm pretty sure, you know, I think you're right. I can't, you know what? I don't even know anymore, but there was a big buildup to it for us to build up. So they gave us plenty of a warning that it's coming.

MICHAEL: We keep saying it let's explain what it is because, you know, it was a good intro there about the, um, the pillars. So back in the early episodes, we spoke about all the pillars of SEO. We had UX as its own pillar because we feel like traditionally we'd always spoken about the big three, but UX is like a fourth pillar we've added in there and Core Web Vitals sits in that world. So it's basically Core Web Vitals are like a set of metrics. that relate to the user experience of your website. So, you know, the speed, the how nice it is to use, how like sort of how the content loads. Yeah. Just the experience of using the site. And is it good or is it bad? And the core web vitals are these metrics that you use to try and measure that. Yeah.

ARTHUR: See how you're going, which is a hard thing to measure. If you could think about it, how do you measure user experience without having a, you know, yes. Define metrics, which Google has done.

MICHAEL: Yeah. So I saw a description online of it that I thought was pretty good. I'm going to read it word for word here. So the metric score, how quickly page content loads, how quickly a browser loading a webpage can respond to a user's input. So someone like clicking into a field or trying to do something with the page and then how unstable the content is as it loads in the browser. So like, is the page just loading or is it moving around and making it annoying to engage with that page? Yeah. That's pretty much it. Let's dissect that.

ARTHUR: Yeah. So the first thing you said there, these metrics show how quickly the page content loads. So that's referring to LCP. Yeah. So LCP is a metric. Yeah.

MICHAEL: Which stands for one, one, one, one to say largest contentful paint.

ARTHUR: Yeah. That's it nailed it.

MICHAEL: They could have made it the largest content paint.

ARTHUR: Yeah, it's just, it's weird to say out loud. I feel like people don't, if people don't know what it is, then they might think that you've made a mistake.

MICHAEL: Yeah. We've made it up. Yeah. So what is largest content full paint? We know it's about speed, but like, what is it exactly? I'm not, I'm not letting that one hang.

ARTHUR: I was waiting for you to see if you're letting that one hang. Um, so basically what it does is it just measures the time or the seconds from when the webpage starts loading to when the largest text block or image element is rendered on the screen.

MICHAEL: Yeah. So if you think about a page loading, yeah, you click the link in Google, the website loads and it's maybe not everything on the page is finished loading, but the guts, the real sort of stuff, the main stuff that you see has loaded. How long does that take? Yeah. You want that to be quick.

ARTHUR: Yeah. So Google says anything on the two and a half seconds is good. Um, in search console, four and a half seconds is like, you know, anything below that, it will start to warn you anything above that. Obviously you need to start looking into why that's happening.

MICHAEL: Hmm. And this feeds into stuff that we're banging on about all the time on this show, which is fast websites are important for SEO purposes. Excuse me, not just for SEO purposes, but for user experience, for, for everything, you know, Google loves fast sites. People love fast sites. As we always say, this is just another reason, you know, your largest content full paint score is another reason why you need to focus on the speed of your site. So the next metric is first input delay. Yes. FID, F-I-D. Yeah. What is that one all about?

ARTHUR: So basically I guess it's in the name, right? How quickly you can actually use the input or use the user page as it's loading.

MICHAEL: Cause yeah, I bet you've had that experience on a mobile phone, right? Well, even on a desktop, true. Let's say you can see there's a form field in a page and you're trying to click it, but you can't because the page finishes.

ARTHUR: It's annoying. I find it more common on websites where you kind of want to click on something that's still loading.

MICHAEL: Yeah. Yeah. In fact, I think even on one of the older versions of our, our website, we had to get a quote button in the header. And if you tried to click on it, like immediately when the page first loaded, it wouldn't do anything until the page had finished loading. Yeah. That was years ago. We fixed it at the time, but now that's the sort of stuff that really bad school we would have if the score existed back then. Yeah. But, um, that's the sort of stuff that first input delay is trying to let you know as a website owner, you know, when you're, when you're checking your scores for it, Would I be right in saying that, checking your scores?

ARTHUR: You'd be correct. I would be. You'd be correct. So Google recommends a hundred milliseconds or less. So that's pretty quick.

MICHAEL: It is pretty quick. Almost instant. Yeah. Like everything, you want it to be almost instant. Everything with your website anyway. So moving on, CLS. Cumulative layout shift.

ARTHUR: CLS. CLS is a Mercedes-Benz model, but it's also cumulative layout shift. Basically what this looks at is how the page loads, making sure that it loads in a way that it's not shifting around for the user. So if you can imagine the page loading on your phone, you try to tap on something, but there's an image loading at the bottom and it pushes that element down and then, you know, you give another half a second and it pushes it down again. So basically trying to eliminate that, making sure that it's visually, visually stable.

MICHAEL: Yes. And I really, I really liked this one, like as a thing to try and have sorted with your website. Cause it's really annoying using a site and like, but mainly a mobile. It's mainly a mobile. When you go to like tap something and like an ad loads shift stuff and then you click the wrong thing. Yep. It happens in a new tab. Yeah. You've got to go through that whole rigmarole of closing the tab and going back to where you were before. Yeah. That's precious seconds right there.

ARTHUR: Yeah. So basically it's just about unexpected layout shifts.

MICHAEL: Yeah. which do happen, you know, because of scripts loading on your page or different assets loading, you know, large images taking a long time to load and then just changing things. So you want your site stable when you're first loading it. Agree. They are the three metrics of core web vitals. So it's pretty simple. You're probably asking why are they important? Like, why do I care? Well, Google said it's important.

ARTHUR: It's a ranking factor. That's why we care. A lot of people won't even think about these things when they look at a website.

MICHAEL: But it kind of does impact your bottom line in a way. Like if you have a really bad user experience, like it's slow to load. You can't engage with elements. Like even sometimes you're trying to engage with things and it just doesn't work. Like trying to open up a menu. Trying to open a menu, yeah. Frustrating. So then you just leave. And that's the sort of stuff that will affect your bottom line as a business owner. So it's not just Google nerds like us that are caring about this stuff or that should care about this stuff. You want to be making sure your website's just nice to use because it affects your bottom line.

ARTHUR: Yeah. So essentially Google has just found a way to. what's the word I'm looking for to put it like a score behind it so you can improve it basically because before this you couldn't quantify your user experience with the big words.

MICHAEL: I love it.

ARTHUR: Yeah. Yeah. Before this, you know, you kind of just had a website, no one kind of thought about these things before now. So definitely, definitely very useful for any website owner to kind of pay attention to these three metrics.

MICHAEL: So on the topic of paying attention, How do you do it? Like, how do you get these scores? What sort of tools are we using to do that at the moment? Or can people out there listening to this use to check out their own scores for those metrics?

ARTHUR: Yeah, look, two tools I use, Google's PageSpeed Insights tool will let you know your scores for all three of these metrics. That one's, a lot of people have used that just to see the PageSpeed Insights score. I guess over the last year slash years, it's expanded to include these metrics. But the other tool I like to use is the, I don't know if you've seen it before, but the Core Web Vitals Overlay. So very similar to Ahrefs, Moz, all those other overlays. When you set it up, you just search for something in Google as you would, and it kind of shows you all the metrics for all the sites in the search results, which is really cool. So as an SEO, you can kind of have a look, and if you're trying to figure out why this site might be outranking your site, you can at a glance see, all three of these metrics. So you might find that they have better scores, much better scores, and you might see that your result has a very poor score. So you can come to the conclusion that perhaps I need to work on improving the speed of my site or the usability of the site. Yep. So that's a really handy tool. So that's just a Chrome browser. Yeah. It's just a Chrome extension. Very, like I said, very similar, just overlays over the search results, the SERPs.

MICHAEL: Yeah. And so like, let's say you, you do, you're using that extension and you can see that your, Scores for those three metrics are not the best compared to the top ranked sites. How do you go about fixing it? Well, first and foremost, fast loading website. We always bang on about that. We've got a bunch of episodes in the past talking about site speed, why it's important and how to fix it.

ARTHUR: So Google will let you know which pages. So if you go search console is where you need to go to find all these recommendations or any issues with these three metrics. It will let you know which pages need to be looked at. And if you use PageSpeed Insights, like with PageSpeed Hints, I'll let you know how you can improve your Core Web Vital.

MICHAEL: Yeah. Metrics. Yeah. A lot of the time as a business owner, it's not stuff that you're going to be taking care of yourself. Probably you will involve a developer, you know, especially for this stuff. Yeah. If things are, you know, if something on your site is blocking the rendering of a form field and people can't engage with it, that's something that a developer is going to fix for you. But at least with these tools like page speed insights, it's a little bit of a roadmap that you can use to, yeah, it gives you high priority items you need to look at.

ARTHUR: Exactly. To fix and improve your scores. So very handy tool, free to use. Just Google PageSpeed Insights, chuck in your domain and you should see your scores.

MICHAEL: Yeah, well there we go. In the name of a good user experience, we won't drag this podcast episode out any longer. No, we're short and sweet to the point. We've got a good speed score there. We've got a good user experience score. I think we've done pretty well. Yeah. Um, so hopefully you enjoyed that. If you did leave us a review, give us a follow wherever you get your podcasts. Otherwise we will see you or you'll hear us at the next episode of the SEO show. Happy SEOing. See you later.

ARTHUR: See ya.

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