White Hat SEO Tactics for Better Page Experience

When Google’s Page Experience update finally rolled out in early September, it reoriented the search engine’s criteria for evaluating websites. This led to a change in the SEO community’s SEO marketing strategies, especially for user experience signals. After this update, some important changes occurred in the following months, which perplexed many SEO marketing experts.

For instance, the cumulative layout shift has changed, and Google rolled out safe browsing. The search engine company also removed AMP from the Top stories requirements, resulting in many news websites considering dropping it.

One of the most significant components of Google’s Page Experience — the Core Web Vitals — has also gathered a lot of heated debates from SEO marketing experts. The SEO community has questioned how vital these metrics are in terms of rankings, prompting many to conduct a deeper analysis of the data.

One SEO looked at 5.2 million individual pages and found out that only 11.4 per cent of them met Core Web Vitals’ recommended standards, which made site owners wonder if Core Web Vitals optimisation was necessary or not.

These may be minor ranking factors, but from an SEO standpoint, they’re still essential. Many Google employees have stated that these seemingly insignificant elements act as tiebreakers that could make or break a site’s rankings.

Core Web Vitals include some of the most important principles of page experience. Even if they don’t give the major ranking improvements that SEOs desire, they point to aspects of user experience that are critical for businesses looking to convert more visitors. And as Google continues to integrate these kinds of signals into its algorithms, one’s site visibility is much more likely to improve.

Below are five concepts that marketers should prioritise when optimising for the Page Experience update.

Smaller resources for faster loading

The most essential user-centric measure is the Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), which measures perceived load speed. This is when a website’s major content has finished loading.

Users want their content to load as quickly as possible, which is no surprise. However, marketers must collaborate with their development teams to reduce resource sizes. To get a higher LCP score, one should focus on smaller resources for faster loading of pages.

So, if there are unnecessary resources, one should leave them out. A smaller site is faster because it requires fewer bytes in CSS, JavaScript files, and HTML, so one should consider getting rid of anything that isn’t required.

Server location

The site’s servers’ location has a significant influence on the page experience. That is why site owners and marketers should use a content delivery network (CDN). These geographically dispersed server networks may collaborate to improve user experience.

Simply stated, location matters. One should also consider the time it takes to reach a server, as well as the time it takes to transfer things from one server to another.

CDNs are especially beneficial for large websites since they allow them to leverage other resources worldwide. As a result, one’s content may find its way to searchers when they need it more quickly.

Using the same server

When it comes to improving page experience signals, marketers should take advantage of a single server if feasible. Each extra server linked consumes more time to load, which might result in sluggish load speeds on web pages.

If possible, one should keep everything on the same server. Every additional connection to a different location entails more roundtrips and delays. If one employs extra servers, it would be best to use preconnect and DNS-prefetch. Adding preconnect and DNS-prefetch code can be useful as they assist in the development of early connections between servers.

Correct caching set-up

Setting up caching can help ensure a quality page experience over time. SEOs and website operators should utilise this feature on a regular basis to relieve strain on servers, even if the initial page has a longer loading time.

When one uses caches as much as possible, the first load might take longer. But every page after that would have all been downloaded, and this includes elements like JavaScript, CSS, and fonts. At that point, all would be locally stored, resulting in very fast loading times.

Prioritising items during page resource loading

Web pages must load numerous assets before users can view and interact with them. Some resources, however, are more crucial than others. Take HTML, CSS, fonts, and JavaScript in the browser, for instance;  the servers would have to choose which to prioritise. One should also load things that users would see first when they visit the website or elements that complete the initial viewport. Then the rest comes later.

The aim should be to load the things that people see first, then the secondary resources. Using inline coding to structure resource loading in this manner may help SEOs load the essential content faster.

Inline CSS means taking part of the CSS file and putting it in the HTML. So, while the HTML downloads, the SEO gets the CSS needed for the visible page and wouldn’t have to wait for another CSS to download to start.

Google will grow so complex that SEOs won’t have to worry about these technical elements of page experience as much in the future. Google and similar platforms are going to solve a lot of these speed problems for SEOs, so they won’t need to bother developers, and developers won’t have to focus on it.

Although this might still be in the distant future, optimising for Core Web Vitals, even though they are tiebreakers, can snatch audiences from site competitors.

Improve Your Site’s Page Experience with Position1SEO

Position1SEO is the number one SEO agency in the UK. We have a team of SEO experts specialising in all things related to search engine optimisation and SEO marketing strategies, including improving your website’s page experience.

Our goal is to help you rank higher on Google search results and attract more visitors to your site with our diverse range of SEO services, such as technical advice and keyword research, link building campaigns, social media management, content creation, and much more.

Boost your search rankings now with Position1SEO! If you have any questions, feel free to contact us!