Why Google's next big update matters to your website

Online Marketing Basics for Busy Website Owners

In this episode of my weekly podcast 'Online Marketing Basics for Busy Website Owners', I look at how you can get your website ready for Google's next big search algorithm update 'Page Experience' to ensure that you don't lose out on search rankings when it rolls out.

Google have given website owner's a year's notice to get our act together and ensure that are our sites are ready for the update, so if they think we need that amount of time (pandemic included) then it's worth taking note.

In Google's own words [please link 'own words with https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2020/11/timing-for-page-experience] they have said that "We believe that providing information about the quality of a web page's experience can be helpful to users in choosing the search result that they want to visit."

So if your website is poorly designed and not a great user experience then you're going to have to review and update or risk losing your ranking in search.

Google have also said that they will be including Core Web Vitals in how they determine the quality of a page too, so anything you can improve on mobile-friendliness, site speed and user interface will only help too.

I'm still learning about and following the experts on what we can expect so plan to revisit this topic again before May, but I hope the episode helps yo figure out areas of your site you probably could do with focusing on and how to go about improving it.

01:57 Why I'm excited about this update

05:02 Why you need to be concerned about this update too if you already rank highly for certain keywords or key phrases

07:13 Mobile optimisation is still a really important part of website optimisation

08:43 I use https://crossbrowsertesting.com/ to test my sites on different mobile devices

09:42 Beware of of the pop-up

11:02 Consider reducing the amount of content on your page

13:12 Down with animated sliders!

15:30 Check your site on https://search.google.com/test/mobile-friendly

15:55 Speed is king!

18:00 Check your website load time with this tool: https://gtmetrix.com/

18:39 Try using a caching tool. More on that here: https://wordpress.org/support/article/optimization-caching/

20:17 Get in the habit of raising tickets with your host and website provider to help you speed your site up.

21:22 Check your site speed with Google here: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/

22:41 Design and user interface

26:36 Try using a tool like https://www.crazyegg.com/ to track user behavior

28:15 Get your users to tell you what they think!

30:33 Some extra top tips