With all the buzz around core web vitals, lawyers may be asking themselves a basic question: What are Core Web Vitals, and why do they matter? SEO marketers will have a ready answer for you. Core Web Vitals are critically important because they provide these key benefits:
- Core web vitals can impact SEO success
- Good core web vitals help you rank
- Core web vitals make a site user friendly
So, what exactly are Core Web Vitals? It’s all about Google search results. In an effort to assess a website’s performance, Google looks at how well users interact with each page – otherwise known as “user experience,” or UX. Goo e evaluates UX based on three essential metrics – loading speed, visual stability, and interactivity. Goog e dubbed these metrics its “Core Web Vitals.” In the words of Forbes Magazine contributor Zach Williams, “Google has been gradually advancing the algorithm to analyze small details like these to help it provide the best content and results.”
Before we explore these three elements and their impact on visitors to your law firm’s website, let’s first discuss the benefits of excellent Core Web Vitals.
Core Web Vitals Can Impact SEO Success
From increased time-on-page to conversion rate to visual appeal, core web vitals can impact SEO success by making sure users find your site because you stand out from the crowd. Google tells us Core Web Vitals are essential, so we should listen. Core Web Vitals are related to design and back-end programming, so you really have to know what you’re doing to experience success in this area.
Good Core Web Vitals Help You Rank
Who doesn’t want to be at the top of page one on a Google search engine results page (SERP) or even snag a coveted featured snippet? Everyone! Good Core Web Vitals help you rank. If you want to be the first law firm people see at the top of the list, exceptional Core Web Vitals are essential. Positions 1 through 3 on a Google results page get by far the highest click-through rates (CTR), meaning lots more people wind up on your website.
Core Web Vitals Make a Site User Friendly
In May of 2020, Google announced it was taking additional steps to deliver the very best possible search results to its users. Specifically, it developed an entirely new algorithm that took user experience (UX) criteria into careful consideration. In the broadest terms, the newly implemented algorithm means websites that do not apply industry best practices will inevitably receive lower ranking scores than those that do. Incorporating UX into its ranking methodology, Google takes SEO far beyond its largely semantic and search term-based basics.
Modern SEO Understood
Everybody recognizes Google as the world’s leading internet search engine, but fewer people understand precisely how it works. Beneath the slick graphics of the Google homepage, a complex algorithm decides what results appear on the screen for every search made. After all, Google is competing with other search engines to match user queries with only the best and most appropriate results.
For law firms and any other organization that attracts clients and customers online, leveraging this algorithm is absolutely essential. It can make the difference between a number one result on internet search engines such as Google and a ranking that buries your organization on the third or fourth page of results.
This is where SEO comes to the rescue. By creating content and website protocols designed with top search engine algorithms in mind, you can optimize your online presence for maximum search engine results and position your organization for success.
Google’s 3 Core Web Vitals
So, let’s take a closer look at the three Core Web Vitals that Google now uses to assess every website’s overall UX score:
No. 1: Loading speed
Although the first Core Web Vital might sound quite complicated, the “Largest Contentful Paint” rating (LCP) essentially boils down to the average loading time for the pages on your website. LCP places a specific emphasis on “perceived” load speed and access to each page’s “main” content. In other words, how quickly does the principal text or media become visible to website visitors? The answer to this question will determine your LCP score. We’ve all had to sit restlessly waiting for a page to load, and it’s frustrating. You want to avoid this at all costs.
Scored at the page level, LCP targets many main content types. For example, a main subheading might be the main content for a blog post, while a product image might be the main content for an ecommerce page. In general, Google looks for pages that load in 2.5 seconds or less to meet its established UX expectations. Any loading time greater than 4 seconds is considered “poor” in terms of UX.
To boost the LCP score of your website, take a close look at all its foundational and operational elements, including JavaScript, CSS, and web servers. Concentrate on reducing the loading time for the biggest displayed file on your page, whether text, image, or video.
If you want to give your website visitors the best UX possible, a good LCP score is key. Anyone who has ever left a website page just because it took too long to load should know the power of LCP. When visitors can access your content instantly, they will be far more likely to interact with it.
No. 2: Visual stability
If you are an attentive internet user, you have probably experienced visible instability resulting from layout shifting. Such instability is particularly prevalent for those browsing a website on a mobile device. Whether caused by the different formatting that mobile user demands or any number of various factors, unexpected layout shifts of visible content will undoubtedly detract from positive UX. For this reason, Google focuses on “Cumulative Layout Shift” (CLS) as one of its Core Web Vitals.
CLS quantifies the combined total of individual layout shifts over the entire lifespan of a web page. Google accomplishes this by measuring the rendering time of elements from one frame to the next as the page loads. A low CLS score indicates a relatively stable page, while a high CLS score indicates an unstable page. According to Google, a good CLS is less than 0.1 seconds. Pages that measure between 0.1 and 0.25 seconds need improvement, and pages that measure above 0.25 are classified as poor.
If you want to ensure page stability on your website, you should pay careful attention to defining image sizes in your HTML. Other factors, including animations, can also have a profound impact on your CLS score.
By optimizing for this CLS, you can stop website visitors from accidentally clicking away from desired content and save them from the frustration of visiting a page that differs from the one they wanted to see. By enhancing overall UX, visual stability improves the SEO performance that boosts your bottom line.
No. 3: Interactivity
Evaluated by Google through the “First Input Delay” (FID) metric, interactivity refers to the ability of a website visitor to engage with a page using an interface such as a keyboard or mouse. Essentially, FID measures the amount of time between a user command (usually in the form of a click or a keystroke) and the execution of that command.
To pass Google standards, your website pages must achieve an FID score of less than 100 milliseconds, and any score over 300 milliseconds could prove devastating for your SEO performance. After all, any visitor who clicks on a button or fills out a field that simply fails to work is bound to feel frustrated and report poor UX.
One method of improving FID is to limit the negative impact of third-party code, such as added scripts for A/B testing or digital analytics. Whether poor interactivity is caused by third-party code or not, website owners can boost their FID scores by compressing CSS files, breaking up long Java script tasks, and using “lazy loading” for less urgent content.
The Importance of Core Web Vitals in the Field of Law
Because far too many law firms fail to make SEO a top priority, precious few of them are well versed in the supreme importance of Core Web Vitals. However, any firm that wants to attract more website visitors and project a credible image online must take SEO seriously. In short, SEO is a key driver for attracting new clients and retaining existing ones. So take a minute to learn about SEO by reviewing articles that appear in Search Engine Journal and Search Engine Land. Then talk to some experts in SEO who can explain the details and answer your questions.
Explore a Conversation with an SEO Legal Marketing Agency
As part of its outstanding website design for lawyers, Gladiator Law Marketing pays particular attention to SEO and conversion optimization, leveraging the power of technical metrics such as Core Web Vitals to drive success in the legal field.
Offering award-winning website design for lawyers, the experts at Gladiator Law Marketing know the supreme importance of search engine optimization (SEO) when driving traffic to the websites it creates. As part of Gladiator’s dedication to helping its national client base stand out from the competition and secure new business, the firm stays up to date on the technological evolution of SEO. It leverages the power of innovations such as Google’s Core Web Vitals. The outstanding client reviews we receive and awards we’ve won bear witness to our efforts. So let’s start a conversation. We would be happy to explore your website needs in greater detail.
