Category Archives: Online Marketing

Google’s Core Web Vitals to Become Ranking Signals
02 Jun

Google’s Core Web Vitals to Become Ranking Signals

Google announces an upcoming change to search rankings that will incorporate Core Web Vitals as a ranking signal.

Search signals for page experience

“The page experience signal measures aspects of how users perceive the experience of interacting with a web page. Optimizing 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.”

Google is introducing a new ranking signal, which combines Core Web Vitals with existing user experience signals, to improve the way it evaluates the overall experience provided by a page.

This new ranking signal is in the early stages of development is not scheduled to launch until at least next year.

To help site owners prepare, Google has provided an early look at the work being done so far.

The New ‘Page Experience’ Signal

The upcoming ranking signal will be known as the page experience signal.

The page experience signal consists of the Core Web Vitals, as well as these existing page experience metrics:

  • Mobile-friendliness
  • Safe-browsing
  • HTTPS-security
  • Intrusive interstitial guidelines

Core Web Vitals

Core Web Vitals, introduced earlier this month, are a set of metrics related to speed, responsiveness, and visual stability.

Google has defined these as the Core Web Vitals:

  • Largest Contentful Paint: The time it takes for a page’s main content to load. An ideal LCP measurement is 2.5 seconds or faster.
  • First Input Delay: The time it takes for a page to become interactive. An ideal measurement is less than 100 seconds.
  • Cumulative Layout Shift: The amount of unexpected layout shift of visual page content. An ideal measurement is less than 0.1.

This set of metrics was designed to help site owners measure the user experience they’re providing when it comes to loading, interactivity, and visual stability.

Core Web Vitals are not set in stone – which means they may change from year to year depending on what users expect out of a good web page experience.

For now, the Core Web Vitals are what is listed above. Google will certainly update the public if and when these metrics change.

For more details about Core Web Vitals, see our full report from when they were first introduced.

Page Experience Signal & Ranking

By adding Core Web Vitals as ranking factors, and combining them with other user experience signals, Google aims to help more site owners build pages that users enjoy visiting.

If Google determines that a page is providing a high-quality user experience, based on its page experience signal, then it will likely rank the page higher in search results.

However, content relevance is still considered important when it comes to rankings. A page with content that’s highly relevant to a query could conceivably rank well even if it had a poor page experience signal.

The opposite is also true, as Google states:

“A good page experience doesn’t override having great, relevant content. However, in cases where there are multiple pages that have similar content, page experience becomes much more important for visibility in Search.”

As Google mentions, a page experience signal is a tie-breaker of sorts. Meaning if there are two pages both providing excellent content, the one with the stronger page experience signal will rank higher in search results.

So don’t get so hung up on optimizing for page experience that the actual content on the page starts to suffer. Great content can, in theory, outrank a great page experience.

Evaluating Page Experience

As of yet, there is no specific tool for evaluating page experience as a whole.

Although it is possible to measure the individual components that go into creating the page experience signal.

Measuring Core Web Vitals

When it comes to measuring Core Web Vitals, SEOs and site owners can use a variety of Google’s own tools such as:

  • Search Console
  • PageSpeed Insights
  • Lighthouse
  • Chrome DevTools
  • Chrome UX report
  • And more

Soon a plugin for the Chrome browser will also be available to quickly evaluate the Core Web Vitals of any page you’re looking at. Google is also working with third-parties to bring Core Web Vitals to other tools.

Measuring other user experience signals

Here’s how SEOs and site owners can measure the other type of user experience signals:

  • Mobile-friendliness: Use Google’s mobile-friendly test.
  • Safe-browsing: Check the Security Issues report in Search Console for any issues with safe browsing.
  • HTTPS: If a page is served over a secure HTTPS connection then it will display a lock icon in the browser address bar.
  • Intrusive interstitial guidelines: This one is a bit trickier. Contact Us to what counts as an intrusive interstitial.

When Will These Changes Happen?

There is no need to take immediate action, Google says, as these changes will not happen before next year.

Google will provide at least 6 months’ notice before they are rolled out.

The company is simply giving site owners a heads up in an effort to keep people informed about ranking changes as early as possible.

Source: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/googles-core-web-vitals-ranking-signal/370719/

Source: https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2020/05/evaluating-page-experience.html

How can I Make AMP Work for my WordPress Site?
01 Apr

How can I Make AMP Work for my WordPress Site?

Here’s where things get interesting because you can actually integrate AMP to your WordPress website with just a few steps.

  • Install the AMP WordPress plugin
  • Activate the plugin – what it will do is append /amp on all your pages but what it won’t do is redirect mobile visitors to your /amp pages
  • So the next step is to edit your .htaccess file – you could use an FTP program to do this.
  • Lastly, you will want to edit the CSS to make your Accelerated Mobile Pages look and feel more like your site.

Need help setting up AMP with your website? Give us a call today at 855-225-4535

8 marketing trends for 2017
14 Mar

8 marketing trends for 2017

Regardless of the year, visibility continues to be an important aspect of marketing that won’t change—Here are 8 marketing trends for 2017.

1. Personalized everything. As we work to individualize everything from Coca-Cola cans to shoes, mass customization has transitioned into personalization. For some businesses, this will mean ensuring touch points are specific and individual. For others, it’s simply streamlining the purchasing process and making it more responsive.

2. Increased focus on customer experience. Customer experience has been always the heart of marketing for every industry. While it has always been a marketing focus, today’s successful businesses have embraced customer-satisfaction whole new philosophies to create effective marketing strategies and positive digital transformations. Keep up with your customers.

3. Marketing technologists and data scientists. As companies aim to connect social media channels, along with other online marketing strategies, they must incorporate technology needed to implement and support it. Expect Chief Marketing Technologists to lead this initiative from now on.

4. Meet Analytics 2.0, the Engaged and effective measuring. Talk of measuring marketing has always been a subject of much attention. It’s no secret that Facebook and other websites don’t tell a complete story about your business’s facts, and what we have most of the times becomes too complicated to deal with, or even understand. Now—and in the upcoming year—measurement will be done with purpose. Expect business objectives to tie back to profit, revenue, customer retention, and satisfaction, and implement Analytics 2.0 to revolutionize the measurement methods.

5. More and more social media marketing. What do you expect from your Social media strategies? It should always sell more than concentrating in blasting messages or post updates. It’s a fact that your customer’s attention spam are decreasing daily. Use social media for the frontline marketing of sales and services. Use it to engage with consumers, do not spend time blasting unnecessary messages or irrelevant posts.

6. Get great and B=better video content or your business and services. Yes, content is still king, the usual web content, Social content, testimonials and reviews, blogs, papers, and press releases will continue to be crucial aspects of marketing, however video content will be the trend moving forward. Expect virtual and augmented reality to take us into the future. Brands that fail to incorporate or to implement visuals and videos will be left behind.

7. Embrace the “Internet of Things (IoT). Although still at infancy, businesses more often are looking into leveraging the power of billions of connected devices and how they communicate with each other. Collecting and making that data useful, though, will be key. Beacons, sensors, edge devices, smart TVs, smart homes, smart fitness apparels, and more are all producing data that can be useful for your business, creating more opportunities to get closer to your customer. IoT will transform how we leverage tech and data.

8. Consumer behavior learning technology. This means technology that knows your likes, dislikes and needs, and can guide you on where to eat, when to travel, or where to shop. Data crumbs from across the web is used to understanding guide consumer behavior.

What do you expect for 2017? Share with us your marketing trend predictions for 2017!