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Page Experience - Google

The document discusses Google's new Page Experience algorithm update that will prioritize user-friendly websites that provide positive user experiences. It outlines three main steps website owners can take to optimize for this update: 1) optimize website speed and reduce errors, 2) compare your user experience to competitors, and 3) analyze your website design through heatmaps to identify usability issues. The update aims to rank websites that deliver experiences users love over those with the best backlinks or technical SEO.

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John Cena
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51 views18 pages

Page Experience - Google

The document discusses Google's new Page Experience algorithm update that will prioritize user-friendly websites that provide positive user experiences. It outlines three main steps website owners can take to optimize for this update: 1) optimize website speed and reduce errors, 2) compare your user experience to competitors, and 3) analyze your website design through heatmaps to identify usability issues. The update aims to rank websites that deliver experiences users love over those with the best backlinks or technical SEO.

Uploaded by

John Cena
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Google’s New Algorithm: Page

Experience
Don’t worry… your traffic hasn’t gone down (or up) because of the Page
Experience algorithm update hasn’t rolled out yet.
But it will in 2021 according to Google.
Due to the coronavirus, they decided to give us all a heads up on the
future algorithm update and what it entails… that way you can adjust
your website so your traffic doesn’t tank.
So, what’s the Page Experience update and how can you prepare for it?
Page Experience
In Google’s own words, here is what it means…

The page experience signal measures aspects of how users perceive the
experience of interacting with a web page. Optimizing for these factors makes
the web more delightful for users across all web browsers and surfaces, and
helps sites evolve towards user expectations on mobile. We believe this will
contribute to business success on the web as users grow more engaged and
can transact with less friction.
In other words, they are looking for how usable your website is.

Here’s an example of what they don’t want…

As you can see from the graphic above, the user was trying to click on
“No, go back”, but because an install bar popup up at the top, it pushed
the whole page down and caused the user to accidentally click on “Yes,
place my order.”

The purpose of this update is to make sure that sites that rank at the
top aren’t creating experiences that users hate.

The simplest way to think about this update is that user-friendly sites
will rank higher than sites that aren’t user friendly.

But this change is the start of a big shift in SEO.

Why is this update so important?


What sites do you think that Google wants to rank at the top?
Take a guess…

Maybe sites with the best backlinks?

Or sites with the buttoned up on page code?

It’s actually none of those.

Google wants to rank the sites at the top that users love the most.

Here’s what I mean…

When you want to buy athletic shoes, what brand comes to mind?

If I had to guess, I bet you’ll say Nike.

And if you were to get a credit card… I bet Visa, American Express, or
Mastercard will come to mind.

This is why brand queries (the number of users who search for your
brand name on Google and click on your website) impact rankings,
which I’ve broken down as one of the most important SEO lessons I
learned .
Just look at how the Neil Patel brand has grown over time… the graph
below shows the number of people searching for my name over time:

And here is my SEO traffic over time:


As your brand grows so will your SEO traffic.

But that is old news, that’s been part of Google’s algorithm for years
now.

Here is the thing though, most sites don’t have large brands and Google
knows that. So, if you don’t have one, you can still rank.

At my ad agency , when we look at our clients and their growth over time,
only 4% have large well-known brands. The other 96% are still seeing
traffic growth.
What Google is doing is adapting its algorithm to more closely align with
the mission of showing the sites first that users love the most.

And yes, brand queries are one of the ways they can do this, but user
experience is another metric.

Over the next few years, I bet you will see many algorithm updates
focusing on user experience.

So how do you optimize your user experience?


It starts with each page
It doesn’t mean that your whole website shouldn’t have a good user
experience, but instead, I bet they are going to focus on their algorithm
from a page-level basis.
Because if you have a few pages on your websites that have a poor
experience, but the rest are good, it wouldn’t make sense for Google to
reduce the rankings of your whole site, especially if many of your pages
provide a much better experience than your competition.

Here’s how you optimize your user experience:

Step #1: Optimize your speed and reduce 400 errors


The faster your website loads, the better experience you’ll have.

Go to this page  and enter in your URL.


You’ll then see a report that looks like this:
You’ll notice two important aspects of that report that impact user
experience that I’ve highlighted in the screenshot above.

In the health checkbox, you’ll want to make sure there are no broken
pages. Broken pages create bad experiences.

In the site speed box, you’ll see the load time of your site. The faster
your site loads the better. Try to get your website load time for both
desktop and mobile under 3 seconds.

Ideally you should be in the 1-second range if possible.

Step #2: Compare your experience to your competitions’


You may think you have an amazing user experience, but how does it
stake up to your competition?

I want you to go into the navigation and click on “Top Pages.”

You should see a report like this:


The Top Pages report shows the most popular pages on your
competition’s site from an SEO perspective. The pages at the top are
the ones with the most SEO traffic, which means they are doing
something right.

I want you to go through their top 50 pages. Seriously, their top 50


pages, and look at the user experience of each of those pages.

What is it that they are doing? How does their content quality compare to
yours? What are the differences between their website compared to yours?
For each page that ranks, I also want you to click on “View All” under
the “Est. Visits” heading. This will show you all of the keywords each
page ranks for.
When evaluating your competition’s user experience, keep in mind how
they are delighting people who search for any of those keywords. This
will give you an idea of what you need to do as well.

But your goal shouldn’t be to match your competition, it should be to


beat your competition.

Step #3: Analyze your design


Remember the graphic I showed above of what Google doesn’t want?
Where the user tried to click on “No, go back” instead of “Yes, place my
order” due to design issues.

In most cases you won’t have that issue, but you will have other
usability issues.

The way you find usability issues is through heatmaps. Just like this
one:
Once you log into Crazy Egg, you’ll see a dashboard that looks like this:

On the top right, I want you to click on “Create New” and select
“Snapshot.”

Then select “Multiple Snapshots.”


From there, you’ll want to add at least 3 popular URLs on your site. Over
time you’ll want to do this with all of your popular pages.

Then you’ll see settings like the image below, you don’t need to do
anything here. Just click “Next.”
You’ll then be able to review everything. If it looks good, you can click
the “Create Snapshots” button in the bottom right.

Last but not least, you’ll have to install your tracking script.
So, click on “Install Tracking Script.”
Select the option that works for you and then you are off and to the
races. For example, for NeilPatel.com I use WordPress so I would
select the WordPress option.

Once you are setup, it will take at least a day to see results, if not a bit
longer. It depends on your traffic.

If you get thousands of visitors to your site each day you’ll see results
within a few hours.

After you set up your test and it has been a few days, log back into
Crazy Egg and click on Snapshots in the sidebar.

Once you are there you will see a list of snapshots you have created.
Click on any of your snapshots and you’ll see a heatmap of how people
are engaging with your web page.

What’s cool about snapshots is they show you every single click, or
even scroll that people take. Just look at this example from the
NeilPatel.com site.
As you can see, people are clicking on those images above the text.
But there is an issue… can you guess what it is?
If you click those images, nothing happens. But for all of those people
to click on those images, it means that they believe they are clickable
and that something should happen when they click on them.

An easy fix for me is to make them clickable and when a user clicks
maybe I would take them to a page that goes into detail on each of
those features. Or maybe I could expand upon each feature right there
on that page.

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