The Impact of Core Web Vitals on Your SEO Rankings

Search engine algorithms have been increasingly prioritising the user experience. After all, if a website doesn’t satisfy searchers’ needs quickly, why should it deserve prominent visibility in the results? This is where Core Web Vitals come in – metrics that quantify aspects of user experience. Optimising these signals can directly influence your SEO rankings in 2023 and beyond.

What Are Core Web Vitals?

Core Web Vitals are a set of publicly available metrics that measure aspects like site loading speeds, visual stability of pages, and interactivity of elements during first paint. There are three key metrics:

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) – measures loading speed 

First Input Delay (FID) – quantifies site interactiveness

Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) – evaluates visual stability 

How Do They Affect Rankings?

Starting mid-2021, Google incorporated data from your website’s Core Vitals into its ranking algorithms. Pages that meet “good” thresholds across these metrics are rewarded with better visibility in results. Sites with a sizable percentage of “poor” performing pages will find rankings begin to slip over time.

Moreover, Core Vitals now directly impacts your Google Search Console performance reports. This means vital feedback on the user friendliness of your pages. 

Why Care About Core Web Vitals? 

Here are the key reasons New Zealand business owners must start caring about Core Web Vitals:

– Directly influences organic search visibility 

– Metrics provide actionable insights to improve performance  

– Adds credibility as a publisher of fast, usable content

– Ensures site meets rising user experience standards and expectations

Luckily, there are many common sense technical optimizations to improve Core Vitals like streamlining page weight, enabling compression, efficient caching and more.

The stakes are now higher than ever to create an excellent searcher experience. Core Web Vitals gives Kiwi businesses an objective pathway towards achieving that for higher conversions and stronger SEO prowess.