Martin Splitt Gives Advice To Site Owners On Page Experience Update

Website SEO optimisation becomes even more challenging for the SEO community during times of a new Google update. Making changes to websites during these times can significantly affect search rankings and site traffic. Fortunately, Google’s Martin Splitt gave SEO optimisation experts some helpful last-minute advice regarding the latest Page Experience update.

During a live Search Engine Journal Show appearance, an SEO asked Splitt to send a message to businesses and webmasters who are stressed about optimising and readying their websites before the mid-June update rolls around.

Splitt said that people do not have to worry nor panic as he described the Page Experience update as a “tiebreaker”, which means that it is a lightweight ranking signal. Some websites will find the update substantial, while others will not.

For instance, let’s say that website A and website B are equal to each other in terms of SEO. However, if website A meets the requirements for the Page Experience update, it will have the edge over website B in the rankings.

Splitt said that many businesses and webmasters do not know if they will be website A or website B as it depends on a lot of factors, such as the context, industry, and niche. Therefore, they should not worry too much about it. He also implied that website owners do not need to abandon their original SEO strategies nor shift their focus to improving their Core Web Vitals.

What is important, however, is to make their websites faster to boost user experience. Many companies ignore page speed and mobile usability, but Splitt said it is a huge factor in making their SEO successful. He also said that site speed is crucial regardless of whether Google launches a major ranking signal or not.

Splitt also encouraged in-house SEOs to treat the Page Experience as something important and convince their companies to care about the update. Many businesses may feel like they do not need to exert themselves more or handle the update seriously, but Splitt said that SEOs should be able to change their company’s mindset to be more willing to improve SEO.

He also said that in-house SEOs should be able to tell their company about how the Page Experience update is going to be used as another ranking factor. If they don’t comply with Google’s algorithm systems, they shouldn’t be surprised if they experience a negative impact on their rankings.

With that said, Splitt was quick to warn in-house SEOs not to “oversell” the Page Experience update to the point of dropping everything and focusing exclusively on Core Web Vitals, or else, it might backfire on them. Instead, he advised SEOs to take a reasonable approach to persuade their company.

Splitt also shared advice for people starting new web projects, saying that they must look into Core Web Vitals from the very beginning. Meanwhile, he told SEOs that they should make detailed plans for projects being actively deployed or projects that are already in maintenance mode. For instance, he said they could work on their Core Web Vitals for the next six months, eight months, twelve months, and so on to improve their performance. Doing so will greatly help them, not just with their SEO but their website’s user experience as well.

The Upcoming Page Experience Update

The Page Experience signal is going to be Google’s newest ranking factor that uses different sub-signals to discern a web page’s overall experience and rank it appropriately. This just shows how crucial it is for businesses and webmasters to conduct SEO optimisation for their users to have a pleasant experience as they browse the website.

In the past, online businesses were only concerned about the user experience once their target customer has clicked through and arrived on the website. But with the Page Experience signal, Google forces websites to provide an excellent digital experience even before a visitor lands on the domain.

Some of these subsignals are already being used by the Google algorithm, while others are completely new, which also means that SEOs really have to up their game.

The existing subsignals that will be implemented in the Page Experience update include:

• Safe-browsing – a web page that does not have deceptive or malicious content, like malware and virus.
• HTTPS – this is an encrypted network protocol alternative to HTTP, which prioritises security.
• Mobile-friendly – measures how well websites work when accessed on mobile devices
• No Intrusive Interstitials – intrusive interstitials make a website’s content difficult to access, which creates a poor user experience. However, there are also other interstitials that will not be affected by the new update, including pop-ups for cookie usage, age verification, and the like.

On the other hand, the new subsignals to roll out in mid-June include the Largest Contentful Paint, First Input Delay, and Cumulative Layout Shift.

Largest Contentful Paint refers to a web page’s loading time, with 2.5 seconds being the minimum number of seconds needed to pass the update. Secondly, the First Input Delay measures how long it takes before a page becomes interactive, with anything less than 100 milliseconds being considered good while anything above 300 milliseconds is considered bad. Lastly, the Cumulative Layout Shift measures how stable a website is visually, and it encourages every website owner to have a score below 0.1. Scores above .25 for this metric are considered poor.

SEOs must be prepared for these ranking signals, which are set to launch in mid-June. Still, it is always a good practice to optimise and prepare their websites whether there is a Google update or not – because improving things for a better user experience will always pay off in some way.

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