Google Search ranking factors: 2021 Core Web Vitals
The value of quality content and user experience
Updates to algorithms that reflect the search ranking factors are made regularly, some minor, some major. Major algorithm updates reflect vital changes to search ranking factors and announced months in advance, with considerable industry fanfare, like forthcoming events that we need to take note of, prepare for. Google’s Core Web Vitals ranking update was announced in 2020 to take effect in 2021. This update is focussed on user experience: the algorithm will measure, in the main, site speed, interaction and functional efficiency. The content-focussed ranking factors that dominated the past decade remain important to website quality, user experience, and therefore SEO.
The mere mention of the word ‘algorithm’ can, for many of us, make our eyes roll: Depending on your industry background, it sounds so technical and complex, an area that should be left to the techies, backend people. But understanding search ranking factors (which inform algorithm changes) is important for all web industry professionals: web designers, content creators, UX (user experience) experts and backend developers. We can all contribute to a website’s quality metrics, informed by Google Search ranking factors. Aside from the details, it helps to understand the overview: what helps your site’s SEO is maintaining well-written content, plus a good user experience. This is what Google Search major algorithm updates over the past decade or more lean towards, big time.
Google Search: the mission
The Google Search mission is to:
organize the world's information and make it universally accessible
maximise access to useful information
present information in the most useful way
sell ads
help creators succeed online.
We don’t pay money to get listed in a Google search unless we pay for an ad. According to their statement on ‘Our Approach to Search’, Google never gives special treatment to advertisers through their algorithms.
Some of us are not so trusting of Google’s mission — their broad sweep and influence of our online experience is powerful to say the least. Is it stupid to pander to the all-too-powerful Google? Is Google trustworthy?*
When it comes to search, I think yes, they do a sterling job. And yes, it’s a lot of work maintaining a quality website but as users of search we all like quality.
Google’s algorithm updates in the past decade (at a glance)
Over the past decade or more, Google Search algorithm updates have focussed on quality content and user experience. Long gone are the bad-old days of keyword stuffing to improve rankings — with potential of having poor quality sites ranking highly in search results. The Panda algorithm updates since about 2011 have been about content: websites with duplicated, plagiarised and flimsy content, for user-generated spam and keyword stuffing have been penalised in ranking performance. The Penguin (2012), Hummingbird (2013), RankBrain (2015), and BERT (2019) search algorithms all evaluated quality: relevant, well-structured content and enhanced user experience that is accessible for all users. Responsive design is a ranking factor. So is online user engagement. BERT has cleverly put the focus on using language that is conversational, easy to understand. Keywords are important but algorithms have been set to semantically understand search queries, for example basic queries that could be a question without necessarily including keywords. This is particularly helpful and valuable for those of us who search for information without the knowledge (or keywords in mind) for what we are wanting to find out via a search. What this means for our content is that it pays to have clearly expressed content that is well written and makes sense for everyone.
The Broad Core Algorithmic Update in 2018 turned out to be a problematic one. This update resulted in sites with no quality issues to plummet over night from their ranking position on a search engine results page (SERP) — for no obvious reason. Site owners, web developers and SEOs could do nothing but loose sleep with worry that the hard work previously invested in their site’s SEO had been lost, in one fell swoop. The impacted sites have been reported to be related to health, wellbeing and finance. In reality there were many other sites, outside the reported affected group, that also experienced a negative impact. Google’s response was to say ‘Wait. Focus on building great content’. (Search Engine Land).
So, algorithmic problems arise. Google isn’t perfect.
A correction to the 2018 update followed. Negatively impacted sites did regain their ranking position after the glitch.
Why do so many of us use Google?
In 2020, Google maintained roughly 90% of the share of internet users of search engines (Statista). It’s not that there aren’t competitors — it’s just that Google maintains a giant share of the search market. The results in the graph below are pretty much the same as other statistics available about search engine market share.
For most of us, Google is our go-to search engine. Is it that internet users are confident with, and advantaged from, Google’s focus on improving website quality and accessibility?
Global market share of search engines 2010-2020. In October 2020, online search engine Bing accounted for 6.18 percent of the global search market, while market leader Google had a market share of 88.14 percent. Chinese search engine Baidu's market share was 0.59 percent. From Statista’s Worldwide desktop market share of leading search engines from January 2010 to October 2020.
An article on Ahref, ‘7 Alternative Search Engines to Google (Tried and Tested)’, updated in December 2020, states that the top pick of alternative search engines is StartPage. Why? Because it ‘exclusively uses results from Google, so it’s Google without the tracking’. If privacy is a concern for you, StartPage could be an alternative to Google. But, interestingly, this does suggest that it is Google Search that produces the best results for users.
Researching Search
Search rankings are highly competitive depending on your niche and local competition. If a search engine’s job is to present the best results in response to a user’s search query, to be an effective search engine it pays to research what actually defines and produces ‘the best results’. Google’s algorithmic updates and the research** that informs them have raised industry awareness of what constitutes a quality website with the importance of improving accessible user experience for everyone. It’s research that contributes to what works, and like most research in an industry undergoing rapid change to technology and user uptake, the findings can alter over time as knowledge and technology evolves. The industry on the ground — UX professionals; SEO and IT specialists; web developers and designers; content creators; SEO platforms like Search Engine Land, Moz, and Ahref — also contributes to the research either directly or indirectly, keeping it real.
Like weather forecasts that turn out to be incorrect, the science isn’t perfect. But meteorologists do a damn good job on the whole and get forecasts right most of the time. Same with Google whose search algorithms are tweaked regularly in an effort to get it right, like the big time tweak correction implemented after the 2018 Broad Core Algorithmic Update.
How many of us (users) are there?
Website Hosting Rating has reported the following global statistics as of January 2021:
Internet users — 4.7+ billion
Websites on the internet — over 1.83 billion
Google Search queries daily — 7 billion.
When the internet came about in 1991, there was one website. Thirty years later, there are 1.83 billion websites. That’s rapid uptake! Plus with so many users out there it’s important and helpful, for everyone, that websites have quality benchmarks for useful, engaging and acessible content, and a good user experience.
For more detailed information about the exponential growth in website numbers and usage, see Internet Live Stats.
SEO takes time
There’s no instant fix with SEO. For many of us in small business offering web development, content and SEO services to other SMEs, keeping informed is a must if we want to do a good job and create competitive websites that work. Time and resource management is a juggling act. Common sense and judgement calls kick in with how we work on a site’s SEO to maintain our sites’ competitive edge.
For efficiency, everything points to applying quality content and user experience metrics to websites from the start, and then maintaining this quality standard using Google’s ranking factors as a guide. Getting your site’s content and user experience sorted as the foundation (and a content strategy to go with it!) will then help us take the other SEO steps more effectively — and with integrity — like organising quality backlinks and increasing your domain authority. Adding Schema Markup to each page is done in tandem to page development, but again your development starts with having the content.
Core Web Vitals and SERP rankings
Core Web Vitals are a set of real-world, user-centred metrics that quantify key aspects of user experience.
The minimum requirements of Core Web Vitals focus on your site’s loading speed, including interactivity and functionality. Both mobile and desktop search results will be affected by the minimum requirements of Core Web Vitals scheduled for 2021.
This is a page experience update, with Google signalling the importance HTTPS and safe browsing, mobile friendliness, and the number of intrusive interactions like popups that appear too frequently and annoy. So, with good user experience comes good user engagement and this signals to Google Search that your page deserves to be ranked well. See Google’s ‘Evaluating page experience for a better web’.
Other important Core Web Vitals signals
1. Loading
How fast does your page load? These metrics can be influenced by your content, CSS, JavaScript or slow-server response times.
2. Interactivity (first input delay)
How quick are the interactions on your page? If a page contains CTA links or JavaScript events, how fast does the browser start to process the interaction to take users to the end result? Too slow = poor user experience.
3. Visual stability
How stable is your page? If your page content shifts about the screen on a mobile device, a poor user experience results. Clicking on CTAs can be tricky if a page is affected by instability. There could be a range of reasons why this happens, one being if actual image sizes are not defined in the HTML.
Google Search Top Stories: AMP is going away
Core Web Vitals minimum requirements will influence what pages get into Google Search Top Stories news carousel. Back in 2015 and up to about now, AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) was all the go for making posts load faster and potentially enabling coveted exposure in the curated Top Stories carousel at top of a SERP and relating to a search query. With Core Web Vitals, AMP is no longer required. However, Google will continue to support AMP content in Google Search.
Core Web Vitals measures and fixes
In the Google Search Console, look at your website property’s Core Web Vitals report. This report will indicate which of your indexed pages are poor, in need of improvement, or good. The diagnostics and opportunities for fixes can be quite technical so you may need assistance from a savvy web developer to address some issues listed in the report. Schema Markup on each page will also articulate to Google what your content is about. Correct markup using a script like JSON Schema will contribute to a good Core Web Vitals report for your pages. Find out what is Schema Markup and why it’s important for SEO.
If you see a ‘No data available’ screen, your property is new in Search Console, or that there is not enough data available in the CrUX report to provide meaningful information. Live performance tests for individual URLs can be made using the PageSpeed Insights testing tool or the Chrome Lighthouse tool.
Summary
Google’s ranking factors focus on quality content and user experience. With rankings on a SERP being highly competitive, and with website and internet usage growing exponentially, it makes sense to focus on quality content and user experience as a competitive factor for search.
There is no instant fix for getting pages to rank better after an algorithm update. Instead, improving a site over time by focussing on quality content and user experience, should improve rankings and domain authority. By doing this, all of us — users, site owners and web professionals — are advantaged.
*Discussions about Google can be like venturing down a rabbit hole. Issues about data, privacy, and codes of conduct are important to have in an industry evolving so fast. But this article is specifically about internet search.
**Google’s Research branch is overwhelming extensive. See Google Research ‘Advancing the state of the art’.
