What was 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.
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.
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 the user experience is another metric.
So how do you optimize your user experience?
It starts with each page
If you look at the original article Google posted about the algorithm change, they emphasize “page experience” or “website experience.”
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 any 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
Step #2: Compare your experience to your competitions’
Step #3: Analyze your design
Conclusion
User experience is going to be more and more important over time.
If you love a site and everyone else loves that site, Google will eventually want to make sure that the site ranks high.
On the flip side, if everyone feels a website has a terrible user experience, then Google won’t rank that website as high in the long run.