February-March roundup: SEO and digital marketing insights

Estimated reading time: 4 minutes

This month, we rounded up some SEO and digital marketing insights to help you with your business and online presence.

What’s next for Core Web Vitals?

In 2021, Google rolled out Core Web Vitals: Largest Contentful Paint, First Input Delay, and Cumulative Layout Shift — the set of page experience signals that each represent a distinct facet of the user experience, and have become important ranking factors in mobile search results.

The hype around Core Web Vitals has now subsided since Google’s first announcement, but its relevance to businesses aiming to optimize their sites to Google’s standards has not gotten any less. In fact, it probably will only become more important over time.

Like with Google’s Hummingbird update (the 2013 search algorithm change that revolutionized Google search as we know it, moving away from keyword-based queries and into understanding users’ search intent), Core Web Vitals represent a shift in how users expect to navigate and engage with websites. Over time, the goals we’re trying to reach now for every page experience metric will become the norm, and sites that lag behind will not only suffer from poor search ranking, but also from users’ own evolving expectations on what makes for a great website.

Check out Moz’ video on what’s next for Core Web Vitals.

Bringing page experience to desktop

The page experience update was first rolled out as part of Google’s mobile ranking factors in 2021. Now, Google has begun bringing the same update to desktop, starting in February and expecting to be completed by March this year.

What does this mean for businesses? Core Web Vitals and the thresholds that Google assigned for each metric will now apply for desktop ranking. A new Desktop section has also been added to the Page Experience report in Search Console, so website owners can monitor their site performance.

If you haven’t yet, check out these resources from Google that can help you measure and optimize your page experience. You can also learn more about Core Web Vitals here, along with the respective thresholds that you need to target for your site.

Web Vitals patterns

Still on the subject of Core Web Vitals, Google has recently released a resource for website owners looking to optimize their websites — Web Vitals patterns, a collection of common UX patterns that are optimized by default, including ones that can be challenging to implement without hurting your page experience scores.

The collection includes patterns for carousels, fonts, images, infinite scroll, banners and notices, placeholders, and video.

Interop 2022

Browser compatibility is a common issue faced by web developers and designers. With web browsers built differently, it can be a challenge to ensure consistency in how a website looks and works across all possible browsers that the target audience uses.

To address this pain point, Google and Mozilla along with other major browsers have developed Interop 2022, a benchmark agreed on by representatives of three major browser implementations and developed through public nomination. Interop 2022 focuses on 15 areas or pain points that usually cause compatibility issues, as identified by web developers.

For website owners, this initiative can hopefully lead to smoother and less hassle development (less expensive), making way for more time and resources to spend on improving a website rather than fixing compatibility issues across different browsers.

 

We hope you found actionable insights from this roundup. If you have certain topics in mind that you want us to cover in the next months, feel free to let us know.

Our team at 1902 Software not only provides design and development, we also help a lot with identifying areas for improvement in the user experience, and providing ideas for conversion optimization. Contact us today for a no-commitment consultation.