Is Your Website Ready for Google’s New Algorithm Update?
Last year, Google announced it will be updating its algorithm to include Page Experience.
Don’t worry… your website’s traffic hasn’t gone down (or up) yet as the new Google algorithm is still a month away!
Google’s new Page Experience Update is set to continue the trend towards a better online user experience. What does this mean for your website? What can you do to stop your website traffic dropping off? Joe Ketteridge from TWI’s digital team is on the case, and will try to answer all your questions in the next three minutes.
What is Page Experience?
According to Google…
“The page experience signal measures aspects of how users perceive the experience of interacting with a web page. Optimising 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, user-friendly sites will rank much higher than sites that aren’t user-friendly.
Always noticed big brands dominating the rankings? Don’t worry, if you’re not a major brand (with the associated £££ marketing budget) you can still rank! Google’s new algorithm aims to show sites that users love the most.
Don’t know where to start?
Here are some tips and tools you can use to check your website’s user experience:
- Check your page speed using Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool. You’ll see a section of the report that looks like this:
These are your site’s loading times. The faster your website loads on both desktop and mobile the better. In 2020, mobile devices generated over 50% of global website traffic so try aiming for sub-three seconds on both!
- Compare your site’s user experience to your competitors.
Using TWI’s favourite SEO tool, insert your biggest competitor’s name below:
Scroll through the report and look at your competitor’s top performing pages. What is the user experience like? How does the quality of their content compare to yours?
Next, take a look at organic keywords. What keywords are your competitor(s) ranking highly for? How are they satisfying the users who search for these terms?
- Finally, analyse your design using Hotjar’s Free Heat Mapping tool:
Using Hotjar, you will be able to see how people are engaging with your webpages. A common issue is users clicking on un-clickable images.
In this case, you could simply direct the user to another page that goes into more detail or bring up some more information on the same page!
Let’s wrap things up…
The importance of user experience is only going to grow over time. If you love your website, and everyone else does you will quickly start climbing the search engine rankings!
Start using these free tools and gain a competitive advantage.
Do you want a professional view on how your website is performing? Don’t worry we are here to help! Beat the Google algorithm update and get in touch today on 01473 326907 or email info@thewriteimpression.co.uk.
