1. Why are Core Web Vitals important for SEO?
Example: When you visit a website to search for information and shop online, but the page load time is too slow, you don't have the patience to wait, so you exit the page and visit another website. The other website has a faster page loading speed and a smoother experience. You will definitely stay on this page, read more content, and be more likely to buy their products or services.
Websites with slow page loading speeds will affect business activities
So, now you know how important user experience is for ROI, what has SEO got to do with it?
Google now not only wants websites to have professional content, but the experience of that website must also be good. That's why Core Web Vitals was born, to increase the importance of SEO metrics.
Core Web Vitals - the importance of SEO metrics
If we dive deeper into the surveyed metrics, it's easy to see how much site speed and experience factors have an impact on SEO results:
- According to Rock Content, businesses will lose more than 37% of traffic if the website takes longer than 5 seconds to load.
- Walmart discovered that by increasing the load speed by just 1 second, the conversion rate increased by more than 2%.
- The same thing with AutoAnything when they increased the speed by 50%, the online sales also increased by 12-13%.
Most users prefer a website with a fast page loading speed, which makes them stay on the page, read more content, and be more likely to make a purchase.
Slow page loading speed severely affects SEO results
Understanding the importance of the Core Web Vitals index and how they influence a website and the ranking order is key for all business owners. Core Web Vitals not only affects SEO but also your business situation.
2. Why is Core Web Vitals important to users and businesses?
Almost every aspect of our daily lives is posted online. Work, school, commerce, entertainment - our usual daily activities have suddenly become virtual and we're all spending more time online than we ever have.
- Consumer behavior analysis in 2020 paints a pretty clear digital picture.
- During peak times, Zoom has up to 300 million daily participants in virtual meetings on the platform.
- Broadband data usage jumped 47% in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic.
- Consumer e-commerce spending grew 44% in 2020 from the year before.
All of this sets the scene around web performance and online visual media, especially as it relates to Google's new Core Web Vital metrics, namely Largest Contentful Paint.
Consumers crave online experiences in the digital age
As consumers, we crave more (and better) online experiences. In addition, we expect our digital interactions to load quickly, smoothly, and without delay.
Then, as businesses or brand marketers, we tend to give people what they want. However, as we increase our push on the visual appeal of web pages, the quality of this content increases.
In a company, each department will have a different priority. Core Web Vitals can bring everyone together, by focusing on optimizing user-centric metrics and generating business growth.
Different parts of the company benefit from optimizing Core Web Vitals
Core Web Vitals-optimized decision-makers should see this as a long-term investment in their growth. Delivering a wonderful seamless experience will delight users and help turn them into loyal customers.
Adopting Core Web Vitals has many other short and long-term benefits, in addition to ranking growth. Let's explore some global brands, to see how they optimize Core Web Vitals and what impact it has on their business?
Typical businesses and brands benefitting from investing in Core Web Vitals
- Tencent Video saw 70% better video CTR by hitting the Core Web Vitals metric.
- Cdiscount improved all 3 Core Web Vitals metrics, contributing to a 6% revenue increase during the Black Friday sale.
- Wix increased traffic from mobile devices by more than 250% when it passed the Core Web Vitals assessment compared to the same period last year.
- Nykaa found that a 40% improvement in LCP resulted in 28% more organic traffic from T2/T3 cities.
- NIKKEI STYLE's 18% LCP improvement resulted in 9% more page views per session.
- NDTV achieved a 50% better bounce rate after the LCP halving, among other product changes.
- Agrofy improves LCP score by 70% which correlates with a 76% fall in dropouts.
- Flipkart managed to reduce bounce rate by 2.6% by improving Core Web Vitals metrics.
- Ameba Manga has improved the number of manga read by 2-3 times by improving the CLS score by 10 times.
- Yahoo! Japan fixed CLS resulting in a 98% drop in bad pages and a 15% increase in page views per session.
- AliExpress improved CLS by 10x and LCP by 2x, resulting in a 15% less bounce rate.
3. How do page load time issues and performance work against your profitability?
Looking back at Google I/O 2019, performance engineer Paul Irish made it clear that page load times (as Google sees them) aren't just "speed for the sake of speed".
Instead, speed makes real business sense. Google benchmark data shows how longer page load times have a negative impact on bounce rate, which makes any conversion efforts all the more difficult.
Speaking about the critical nature of performance at the 2019 event, Google product manager Elizabeth Sweeney pointed out these interesting stats:
- The probability of users leaving the site increases by 32% when the overall page load time increases from 1 to 3 seconds.
- 53% of mobile site visits are abandoned if the page takes longer than 3 seconds to load.
- At 10 seconds, the chance to exit increases to 123%.
Sweeney went on to say:
“The impact on user experience is not small. In fact, the required page load speed is the single most important factor in a user's mobile experience. What's more important is how easy it is to find what they want, how simple it is to use the site, and interestingly, it's three times more important than the look of a website. ”
Page load time is the single most important factor in a user's mobile experience.
4. In a nutshell
Whether you're a business owner learning the basics of marketing, an SEO expert, or a developer, Core Web Vitals can help you measure and improve your site's experience, and impact your traffic.
If you want your website to be successful and develop long-term, optimizing user experience is indispensable. If you invest in improving these metrics today, you will certainly not only have a competitive advantage in SEO, but also contribute to increasing conversion rates on your website.
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