On May 28, 2020, Google announced that its page experience update would debut sometime in 2021. It's the most advance notice Google has given for a pending update, and it has had SEO teams around the world racing to be sure their sites are prepared.
"Page experience" means that the elements on your site not only work well technically but also provide a good user experience.
In other words, your site should be intuitive and enjoyable to use, it should meet the needs of your customers, and it should have the content they need to help them move forward in their unique buyer's journey.
Many current SEO strategies rightfully highlight and focus on readability and scannability. Now, content strategists and tech teams must ensure that once someone arrives at their site or page, it functions flawlessly across both Web and mobile browsers.
What We Know About the Update
"The page experience signal measures aspects of how users perceive the experience of interacting with a web page," said Google regarding the update. "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. We believe this will contribute to business success on the web as users grow more engaged and can transact with less friction."
Basically, Google is trying to be more human about SEO. Though its current system does account for some backend and stylistic factors, the update will reward pages that are usable and liked by visitors.
The information Google has released about the update emphasizes the importance of what it calls Core Web Vitals, which look at usability dimensions, such as pageload time, interactivity, and the stability of the content as it loads (an example can be found in the video on this page).
How Page Experience Will Fit Into Your SEO Strategy
It is difficult to report exactly how much Google's page experience update will affect site ranking. The notice is so far in advance that either Google is keeping quiet on the exact impact or it itself isn't even sure yet.
However, Google SEO updates are not unprecedented, and there are some we can look to as potential indicators of the impact. Google's Panda and BERT updates, although more related to queries, fall into a similar sphere as the upcoming page experience update. On their release, Panda affected about 12% of all queries, and Google BERT affected 10%.
Assuming that the page experience update holds a similar weight (about 10%), page experience will not take over as the most important factor in getting a page to rank. That assumption was confirmed by Rudy Galfi, product lead of Google's Google Search Ecosystem. He told Search Engine Land that great content will still hold the most weight in ranking.
Google went a bit further on its blog, saying a page with good content and information but a poor page experience could still rank high, though not necessarily vice versa. Page experience will serve more as a tiebreaker between sites with similarly reputable content.
Three areas to focus on are content, mobile friendliness, and site security:
- Because content is still king, B2B sites should ensure their posts answer their customers' most important questions. From there, find the pages that bring you the most organic traffic; that's where your content audit should begin to guarantee that your page experiences are user friendly.
- More purchases are being made on mobile devices than ever before, and Google has already begun rolling out mobile-first measures. Those, coupled with the page experience rollout, should inspire B2B marketers to make sure their CTA placement and formatting are properly optimized.
- Site security speaks for itself. If a website isn't secure, or it has a high presence of malware and phishing activity, inherently it does not have a good page experience for users; thus, Google will penalize the site accordingly.
How Page Experience Will Affect B2Bs
Up to this point, we've discussed elements of page experience that hold true whether your business is B2B or B2C. But the B2B buyer's journey is different from that of a B2C consumer, and optimal on-page experiences will also differ.
B2C has a direct sales funnel: attract, educate, convert. A B2C company's goal is to move potential customers from the top of the funnel to the bottom in linear fashion, at least within the context of a website. Accordingly, it can be easier to understand how to create a good page experience for B2Cs. The Web team's job is to make sure the already-simple funnel feels effortless to those inside of it—high functionality of the "add to cart" feature or a good product filtering system, for example.
For B2Bs, however, the sales funnel is not always as linear as we expect it to be. B2B sites optimized for the sales funnel should feel less like a path and more like a playground wherein users can explore their own interests and needs. When optimizing for page experience, therefore, B2B companies need unique recommendations that reflect the complexity of their business model.
