2021 SEO Strategy: How Will Core Web Vitals Affect Your Website?

It’s December. Do you know where your SEO strategy is headed for 2021?

Earlier this year, Google introduced Core Web Vitals – a set of metrics developed to give website owners more insight in user experience (UX) on their sites. The better the UX, the greater the likelihood of ranking on Google. 

Unlike PageSpeed Insights, which crawled web pages and developed a report, Core Web Vitals only measures real-world UX, which increases its accuracy. While page speed is a factor in the measurement, Core Web Vitals also considers other factors, such as interactivity and visual stability.

The three metrics used by Core Web Vitals include:

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): A measurement of a page’s load time (or when the page has “likely” loaded). Goal: less than 2 seconds.
  
  
• First Input Delay (FID): An interactivity measurement. Goal: scrolling for more than a few seconds.
  
  
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): A measurement of visual stability. If you put all your CSS code at the bottom to improve load speed, your score will be decreased.
  
  

The Core Web Vitals report can be accessed within the Google Search Console. There are two line graphs included – one for mobile traffic and one for desktop traffic. The lines are color coded: green is good, red is bad and yellow is needs improvement.

Is your organization ready for SEO in 2021?

Sara Foster

The original version of this page was published at:  https://www.greystone.net/resources/blog/healthcare/2020/11/20/2021-seo-strategy-how-will-core-web-vitals-affect-your-website