Google Algorithm Update – User Experience Charlotte Digital Marketing » by Digimatiq Digital Marketing

Google has announced a major shift in how they evaluate websites

Google has just announced a new shift in the way they will start ranking websites phasing in late 2020 into 2021. For anyone who makes their income on Google’s search engine results, this is a big change and a big opportunity to grow your web traffic.

Google over the last decade has decided to shift away from very technical ranking factors into more semantic and contextual factors. This latest update now includes User Experience into the mix and sets up the measurements in their Core Web Vitals update. In the past, mobile websites needed to be on AMP (Advanced Mobile Pages), which is a bare bones version of a page served on mobile devices. While fast-loading, the user experience was lacking on these versions of the pages. Without these specific add-ons, your website would not rank as well organically.

Google will now use real-world user user interaction data instead of JUST technical data around the speed and file sizes of your website on a mobile device.

Google has now basically said, in addition to your site loading fast on mobile and hitting good Page Speed numbers, we will now also factor in how easy your site is to use (User Experience).

The following announcement gets into technical detail on the update, so head over there to read the entire article. The basic intent is to now include factors that relate to how a real person interacts with your website. Things like a shifting page layout, buttons that don’t do anything when pressed, or the worst of them all, getting all the way through online checkout and then having the website prevent you from ordering. We’ve all had those frustrating moments with online shopping and Google is recognizing that shift.

We feel this update is an excellent improvement in updating ranking factors to the challenges of real-world user interactions with websites, adding much needed context to the important factors that determine who shows up on first page for certain keywords.