SEO
While we don't consider ourselves experts in Search Engine Optimisation, we believe we have a decent understanding of it...
Designed to be found
There is no point in having a website, if nobody can find it.
Traditionally, the key to ranking on Google was through SEO (Search Engine Optimisation). This practice improves a website's visibility in unpaid ("organic") search engine results, helping to attract more relevant visitors. It involves making content more understandable for search engines and aligning it with users' search queries by using keywords, providing quality content, and ensuring good site structure.
While these principles still hold true, Google has introduced updated metrics known as Core Web Vitals. These critical metrics assess real-world user experiences on websites, focusing on loading speed, interactivity, and visual stability. These scores dramatically impact search rankings by indicating how fast, responsive, and stable a page feels to visitors. In today’s online environment, "page speed" is essential.
Page speed and mobile performance are both essential factors for your website's success. Google uses the results of these Core Web Vitals as a ranking signal, meaning better scores can lead to much higher visibility in search results.
The assessment covers four areas:-
- Performance - Checks how quickly the page fully loads.
- Accessibility - Checks if your webpage can be used by people with disabilities, has keyboard navigation, good contrast etc.
- Best Practices - Checks for problems like layout shifts and generally ensures the page adheres to modern web standards.
- SEO - Checks whether a webpage adheres to search engine optimisation best practices. It does not analyse content quality or keyword strategy.
To measure page performance, we utilise Google PageSpeed Insights. This web performance tool, developed by Google using Lighthouse, helps us to identify ways to make websites faster and more mobile-friendly by following best web practices. The reports generated by PageSpeed Insights provide insight into how well a page is likely to be regarded by Google. Beyond the graphics, the report goes into great detail, highlighting the problem areas and provides us with possible solutions.
Our expertise in this area, helps us provide search engine results that matter!
Some of the PageSpeed Index (PSI) Core Web Vitals Test Results that we have achieved for our clients
PSI Scoring
- 90 and above (Green) = Fast
- 50 – 89 (Amber) = Average
- 49 and below (Red) = Slow
WDNet (this site) Before last update
This result is from before our last update and clearly our site needed a lot of improvements made to it.
WDNet (this site) After last update
This result is after. *Please note that the first metric, Performance, will always vary. As it is dependent on the amount of traffic on the server, most servers are shared ones, but we should still be able to keep it in the green. For the last three, we are always able to reach 100%
Google's Results (just for comparison)
As you would expect, coming from those that set the standards, they score across the board in this test, (unlike the HTML validation). I suspect that when they first created the page it scored 100% on both Accessibility and SEO too. And the latest scores are a result of Google changing the metrics again, and not yet updating their website to reflect the changes (we had to).
Our largest client
With over 200 pages scoring 100% across the board. *Please note, the 100% Performance was only obtainable through the work that our back-end engineer. Ed, did, in setting this client up in their own server and then writing a custom programme routine that completely strips out any unused code from the HTML, The CSS and the JavaScript files. Without his work, I would never be able to acheive such a result on my own!
Our smallest client
With only around a dozen pages and having a very basic shared hosting service, we still manage to get a respectable 94% Performance result and of course 100% on the remaining three areas.
In Conclusion:
Having a full understanding in Google's Core Web Vitals helps us build you a faster, more user-friendly website, which Google rewards with better search visibility.
By following these practices, we can ensure that your website, no matter what it looks like, meets all the requirements needed to help you stay one step ahead of your competetors. All that is needed now is some content.