Get more organic search traffic for your Shopify store
JSON-LD for SEO is a premium app that has been designed and optimized to get you results in Google, fast.
Every few months or so, Google likes to change things up a bit. Their latest tool which measures how your website pages are performing is called Core Web Vitals.
Core Web Vitals focuses on the users experience using “real world usage data” to measure site performance. You can check your Core Web Vital scores in Google Search Console.
The too long; didn’t read version – Core Web Vital scores MAY help with your Shopify store rankings but quality content is above all the best way to ensure the best possibility of improving your rankings. Google will prioritize pages with the best information overall. A good page experience does not override having great, relevant content.
The information can be a lot to process and fully understand. No matter how hard Google tries to simplify it, understanding the results beyond “Good, Needs Improvement, and Poor” can be challenging.
So I’ll do my best to simplify it for you.
This is when the page moves unexpectedly and is entirely user-experienced-focused. This is also an important piece to ensuring your Shopify site is accessible.
Examples:
If you’ve scored poorly you can make improvements. Here are three quick ideas.
The time it takes for customers to interact with something on the page and when the page responds to that interaction. Most often, this has to do with how much JavaScript is loading from your theme or apps. An interaction could be typing, clicking, tapping, swiping, or scrolling to name a few.
Example:
If you’ve scored poorly, this one may be a bit more challenging to fix because you may not be able to control everything.
This is when the page’s main content has been perceived to be loaded all the way. The page is considered loaded all the way when the largest element such as text content, images, or videos is fully visible.
Example:
If you’ve scored poorly, here are a few ideas on how to improve your score.
Let’s be clear. No one knows the algorithm Google uses for ranking. In fact, Google changes its algorithm on average 6 times a day.
Google themselves downplayed the importance of this update and said
while this update is designed to highlight pages that offer great user experiences, page experience remains one of many factors our systems take into account.
They went on to say
sites generally should not expect drastic changes.
Scoring well on Google’s Core Web Vitals doesn’t mean your site is perfect. It’s one of many metrics to get your pages performing well.
Google does approximately 200,000 – 300,000 experiments a day on search. Some things they get right, others, well it’s an experiment and they learn from their guesses. These measurements are not the end all be all and we expect these metrics to change over time.
An important piece of this puzzle is that these metrics are not real-time.
The measurements are taken over a 28 day period, so there is a lag from when Google incorporates the data into your reports.
So don’t make a change on your site and expect to see immediate results. As with anything on Google, it takes time.
Yes, you should take it seriously. No, you don’t need to put all your efforts into this right now.
As a business owner, there are so many things vying for your attention. Don’t let this consume you.
I recommend you start working towards improving your site but not because these metrics tell you to.
You can pass the core web vitals and still have a page that fully loads in 30 seconds.
As in you can get a good score, but your customers suffer.
From an SEO ranking aspect, don’t lose sleep over this.
From a customer experience aspect, it’s worth investing in.
The good thing is that many ideas to improve your Core Web Vitals score for your Shopify store are already included in the Website Rescues. I have a list of 150 different tweaks or changes to pull from, all geared towards improving the customers experience.
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