SEO Strategy For the June 2021 Google Algorithm
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Have you noticed an increase or decrease in your ranking, or are wondering how the June 2021 Google algorithm will affect your business's ongoing success? While Google's usual updates to its search engine ranking algorithms happen without notice, and often without clear guidelines, this summer's update was announced significantly in advance and is well documented. It includes three Core Web Vitals which create important additional considerations for generating traffic to your site.

The algorithm impacted multilingual SEO strategies globally and has been applied to all countries equally. If you are worried what this might mean for you and your business, read our guide to help you understand its implications.

What is the new algorithm trying to do?

More than ever, Google's new algorithm update puts user-experience at the centre of the rankings. Its new Core Web Vitals have been generated to observe and monitor the loading speed, responsiveness and stability of the websites which appear in its search results. So, to appear in one of the top spots in Google's rankings, your site's technical -as well as content - experience needs to be top-notch.

When was it released?

The page experience update was released on 15 June, however, won't be completed until the end of August. Often algorithms hit hard first, then there's a period of readjustment as websites move slightly back towards their previous positions. Whether this happens with the page experience algorithm remains to be seen.

Understanding Core Web Vitals

The new metrics designed to measure this user page experience are called Core Web Vitals, and there are three you need to understand. They are known as the LCP (Largest Contentful Paint), FID (First Input Delay) and CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift), and between them, they help Google to track a range of user interactions with different websites, using this data to work out the average page speed and performance. This then feeds into where your page appears in search results.

LCP (Largest Contentful Paint)

This part of the Google algorithm update works out how readily each website's largest piece of content can be seen from each visitor's initial viewpoint. In order to pass a Core Web Vitals test, this particular piece of content must load in less than 2.5 seconds, and it accounts for 25% of each site's Google Performance Score.

FID (First Input Delay)

Also accounting for 25% of your score, the First Input Delay metric measures how quickly it takes a given website to respond to its users' button clicks. The 'pass mark' threshold for this is 100 milliseconds.

CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift)

The final Core Web Vital makes up 5% of your Google Performance Score and it gauges the site's consistency. It also works out if elements move out of line when new items are loaded. 

Implementing an SEO strategy for the page experience algorithm

It is reasonable to question how all of these changes and the use of different metrics will affect your site's traffic, and in particular, how your SEO strategy might be affected. Consulting with an SEO expert to better understand how to address changes to your strategy is recommended if your team doesn't have the needed expertise. 

Core Web Vitals are one of numerous ranking measures, so it's worth reviewing what impact it's had on your website so far.  To do so, check the traffic to your site using Google Analytics, or use a tool like Semrush or Ahrefs to look at the change in position for numerous keywords.

If your main competitors score highly for their page experience, but you don't, you will have been most adversely affected. If that's the case, improving page experience is a priority. If you've only seen minor changes, improving page experience will fall into the 'Important but not urgent' category.

You can see various tools to improve page experience at web.dev/vitals-tools/ and also do a page speed test at developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/ which will give you specific insights on how to improve the page speed for your own website.

A lot of the recommendations are technical in nature and unlike most previous updates, this one's definitely one to delegate to your webmaster. In layman's terms, the work needed tends to fall into the following categories:

  • Reducing image sizes - Often images are enormous, but only appear on the screen as thumbnails. Alternatively, they may be very high resolution and could be shrunk by saving them in a different format. Compressing them and saving them as the correct size will significantly reduce loading time. This is the simplest fix to apply, depending on the number of images on your site and it's therefore worth prioritising this for any images that appear on every page, plus your most important pages.

  • Removing unnecessary code - Compressing CSS and Javascript to remove comments and unused code. This is a more delicate process as one CSS file will typically affect multiple pages, so it's important to check several pages even if you've only edited one.

  • Changing the order items load - It might be necessary to configure the site so slow elements load after other elements in order to speed up when the visible part of the page first appears.

Sometimes it's easiest to remove elements altogether that don't add much to the end-user. This has to be handled on a case-by-case basis.

Other Google algorithms

Google also released an algorithm targeting 'web spam' on 23 and 28 June 2021 and their next algorithm is reported to be targeting slander - inaccurate information on websites.

The Page Experience Algorithm is one in a long line of algorithm updates, indeed Google tweak their algorithm 500 to 600 times a year and much of it is controlled by RankBrain, their artificial intelligence algorithm which itself can make adjustments in which ranking factors it considers the most important.

The Page Experience Algorithm specifically targets page speed and user-experience and while Google has measured these factors for a long time, it's one of the first major algorithms to bring these factors to the fore and give them priority. Nevertheless, while you might be tempted to jump straight into optimising your website for Page Experience, it's also worth considering other factors which are likely to have more influence on your ranking, unless your page speed is truly terrible.

The two most important factors for SEO remain:

  • Quality content - Does your website contain appropriate in-depth content that's well written and will engage the reader?

  • Backlinks - Do you have high-quality backlinks to your website from a range of sources? For multilingual sites, are these in the same language as the page they're linking to? Do they include guest posts on blogs that receive significant traffic?

If you would like an SEO audit for your site, or assistance with copywriting, translation or building quality backlinks, visit indigoextra.com.

Should I optimise my website now?

With all the new criteria, you might be tempted to jump straight into optimising your website in every way that you can. Optimising from a technical and content point of view will certainly be beneficial, both for your rankings and also from the point of view of your user-experience, since this is what the algorithm update is most concerned with. Adding in extra relevant content may improve your rankings, too - if this content is missing from your site in the first place. Once you have the right content, optimised technical functioning, and quality backlinks, you should see your rankings improve.

While Google's June update definitely marks a shift from regular updates in the past, once you understand the criteria and its implications for your site, you can make any important changes you might need to ensure your ranking improves.