In today’s episode, Carmen discusses the importance of Core Web Vitals in SEO, explaining their role in user experience and conversion rates. She highlighted that page speed became a ranking factor in 2010 for desktops and 2018 for mobiles, with a delay of one-second reducing conversions by up to 7%. Google’s mobile-first indexing prioritizes mobile page speeds, with ideal mobile page loads under one second.
Key Core Web Vitals metrics include Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), First Input Delay (FID), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS), each with specific thresholds. Techniques to improve these include optimizing images, using lazy loading, and reducing JavaScript and CSS.
Carmen also stressed the importance of prioritizing issues and communicating effectively with developers to address these metrics effectively.
A huge thank you to Uproer for sponsoring our 5th Technical SEO cohort and making these trainings accessible to BIPOC folks in developing countries!
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Name: Carmen Rodriguez Dominguez
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Noteworthy: Carmen has over 7 years of experience in digital marketing, specializing in content, translations, and digital PR before focusing on SEO.
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🗝️ Understanding the Importance of Core Web Vitals
Core Web Vitals are essential for SEO, but they should not be the initial focus. Before addressing Core Web Vitals, ensure that Google is indexing and crawling your content. Core Web Vitals significantly impact user experience (UX) and conversion rates, influencing how users interact with your website. The impact is more pronounced for larger sites compared to smaller ones.
🗝️ Google’s Evolution in Prioritizing Core Web Vitals
Google has progressively prioritized Core Web Vitals, starting with page speed as a ranking factor for desktop in 2010 and for mobile in 2018. Slow page speeds can lead to higher bounce rates and lower conversions, with a one-second delay potentially reducing conversions by up to 7%. Google’s focus on mobile page speed is due to the high percentage of users accessing the internet via mobile devices, making mobile optimization crucial.
🗝️ Breaking Down Core Web Vitals Metrics
Core Web Vitals consist of three main metrics: Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), First Input Delay (FID), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS). These metrics measure loading performance, interactivity, and visual stability, respectively.
Improving these metrics can enhance user experience, reduce bounce rates, and increase the likelihood of users staying on and converting through your website.
🗝️ Optimizing Core Web Vitals for Better User Experience
Several techniques can improve Core Web Vitals, such as using Lazy Load for images, optimizing image sizes, and embedding YouTube videos correctly. Lazy loading ensures images load only when they are in the viewport, speeding up initial load times.
Reducing image sizes and using responsive images can significantly improve page load times. Properly embedding YouTube videos can reduce their impact on load times while maintaining user engagement.
carmen domínguez rodríguez 0:13
Okay, so Core web Vitals is something that I remember a few years ago everyone was talking as the most important bit of SEO, everyone need to focus only on Core web vitals. And it is true that is really important, but is is not necessarily the best.
The first thing that you need to focus when you when you’re working on SEO we already covered when we were talking about the the the different stages of SEO, how Core web Vitals only plays a role at the very end, because before Core web Vitals plays a role, we need to make sure that Google is indexing our content, and we need to make sure that our content is being run and crawl.
However, fixing Core web vitals, it has also an impact in grow, in crawl budgets and how often Google comes to our sites. So yes, while core web Vitals will have an impact, a biggest impact, at the very end of the of the SEO process or the user journey. We need to look at it from the very beginning, and it will the impact I has will depend on on the site that you have.
If you have a very big site, probably the impact is going to be way bigger than if you have a very small site. But equally, it is important that we look at it, sorry, before I actually move move to the next stage, particularly because core web vitals play a very, very important role in UX, and that means in when a user decides to stay in your website and convert in your website.
But before we actually move into a specific hardcore core web vitals, we need to understand a little bit how Google has evolved in understanding Core web vitals and prioritizing Core web vitals. So a part of the main, the main point of Core web Vitals in general, is to fix page speed. And Page Speed actually became a ranking factor, both in 2010 when it was ranking factor for desktop, and then 2018 when it became a ranking factor for mobile.
Why it is important is because it has an impact in in the users and how users expect the website to load. Obviously, the low, the slower the website is, the more chances of users going to another page and another website, and it also has an impact in conversion. So it’s proven by several case studies that one second can reduce so a delay, a delay of one second, can reduce up to 7% of conversions, which is quite a lot of conversions.
And the reason being is because, obviously, users like to have in a smooth process, and also because the more competition there is in the Internet and Internet, and the more websites that they are providing different services or sometimes even the same process, the less patient users have.
And then also, it is important, important one, to understand that Google knows or knew back in the day before everyone was using mobiles to navigate, they will play a very important role in mobile because they knew, and they knew because in stuff, they were creating Android, and they were creating quite a lot of phones that users will spend quite a lot of time on on mobile, so PageSpeed in mobile will become really important.
And in fact, this is a graph of how users have been using mobile, using mobile to look at websites, since 2017 to today, we can see that up to 70, almost 78% of the users access the internet through mobile. And that’s why Google decided to make mobile index first, so meaning that Google will check first your mobile version so the website versus the desktop version of the of the sites.
And now why it is important is because page speeds plays even a bigger role when you’re checking your phone versus when you’re checking your desktop. And this is how Google spec your site to be how fast you spec your sites you decide to render. We can see here it specs your mobile page to be functioning in less than a second, or within a second. That is really, really fast. So that’s the threshold that Google is expecting for every single website currently on the internet to behave.
And it is not the case. And to be honest, very rarely, most of the websites will have all. Of the Core web Vitals perfectly, but it does tell you how important it is for you to prioritize it. And in fact, a little time after first indexing updates, sorry, first mobile indexing updates and Page Speed update, Google created the page experience update, which actually is when it starts, including a lot of different parts to give different signals. This is no longer just page speed as a wild concept is Core web vitals, splitting loading, interactivity and visual stability.
So that means how fast it goes by, how your page interacts with your users and then includes as well mobile friendly, safe browsing, HTTPS, no intrusive and all of those play very important part in what is called Search signals for page experience or page experience overall. And we talk here about there is three different parts. And traditionally, people, when they talk about Core web vitals, they they split the Core web vitals in these three parts, so the loading, interactivity and visual visual stability, but each of them have different Core web vitals. So it’s more than just three. Is several of them, and each of them plays a different role.
However, traditionally, SEOs only talk about three so again, why did all these changes happen? So we already know that Google considers UX as a ranking factor, and UX obviously has a lot of different parts, but us is a ranking factor overall, and Google and people using Google. That is websites. Ultimately, they care about users using using their sites, and that is Google. They care about users coming to Google and the websites about the users coming to the website. So we know that, and Google knows based on all the data that they get, that’s whenever a page,
carmen domínguez rodríguez 7:05
whenever a page speed or page load is bigger than five seconds, the possibility of people living becomes not 90% and 90% is a lot, and one to five seconds is very little. So they know that the faster the web, the web is, the more chances they have for people to stay, and everyone Google and websites included, they want the users to stay within Google and within the websites.
It’s the only way. But the reason why people leave after five seconds, or a lot of people live after five seconds, is because the stress that they feel whenever they need to wait for a website to load can be compared to the stress that they feel whenever they watch in a horror movie. So whenever we don’t consider the stress that our users feel is as easy as looking at a few studies and being able to compare the reaction, it seems really silly, but actually, even myself, I have a brand, the jewelry brand and earring brands I love, but the website is really, really slow.
So I’d rather go to the shop in London, which is two hours away from me, to buy from them that buying online, because the website is really, really slow and it seems like a posh thing to do, but actually, you have so many competitors that go faster. Why would you have to wait with your phone constantly just to buy something?
So this is the point that Google is trying to make by forcing everyone to improve the Core web vitals. And in fact, whenever Google has done quite a lot of surveys, 70% of the results among users always comes to Page Speed or load speed. First, the most important reason for them to leave, or the the biggest reason why people leave a website is because it takes forever to pay to load, and forever is more than five seconds. That is forever for users.
And the second one, sorry, the third one is how well the site fits my screen, which is actually a Core web vital, is part of of mobile first indexing and part of making the images the size of the images fit your your screen. That is considering if you are looking from your website from your phone, and you come up with a website that is not prepared for mobile, it will have an impact as well on how the users feel. 60% 61% of them will leave your site if your site doesn’t feel natural in mobile, which is also crazy.
And then we need to consider as well how attractive the website is and how easy it is to find what you’re looking for, but those are things that are not necessarily connected to Core web vitals. And as I said, Yes, we are talking about Core web Vitals as having an impact in conversion and making sure that your website stays within the user stay within your website, but actually the faster your website it is.
Is, the more often your website will be crawled because it’s a ranking factor, and because the crawler understands that your website is fast, he understands I can crawl more pages because those pages are loading faster. So you know how we talk about the crawler, enjoying and crawling sites quickly and finding the structure easier. The same applies to how fast it loads. If it takes longer to render and longer to crawl, it will spend less time crawling your site. So the faster it crawls, the more pages it crawls.
Is that easy as that? So so far, any questions before I go, I get into the complex Core web vitals. Okay, so what do Core web Vitals metrics mean, and how can we actually make an impact? So traditionally, as I said, Core web Vitals have been split in three, which is largest, Contentful pain, First, input, delay and community cumulative, layout shift all three.
All of these three can be related to what I said earlier about loading, interactivity and visual stability. If you understand those Core web Vitals as these, these three points is going to be very easy for you to understand the impact of each of them. So Google, as I said earlier, has different seconds to decide what is good and what is bad. And normally it based these seconds on the service that they have done.
So it depends on the speed in the issue. So, for example, our largest content pain is from 2.5 to four, anything beyond four, which we know after five people leave, is considered poor. Then first input delay is ready to milliseconds, and then equally commutative label shift is actually whenever you put all the first layout shifts together, and if you sum them up, and it’s beyond zero point 25 sum up overall as a site, then it’s bad. So these three metrics were careful, carefully decided by Google based on on those in data that they got to understand why people were living and this, most of this data is coming directly from Chrome. Is not coming from the crawls.
It’s not coming coming from any other databases that they have. It comes for Chrome because it’s through Chrome that they can understand how people engage with your with your page. So if you will see them, a lot of the data, whenever you are trying to understand what’s going on will come from crooks and Cruz comes from Chrome resource UX. So there you go.
You can actually, you can actually get quite a lot of the data from there. So when I’m going to give you some resource later, so you can see directly in video the impact, the impact that user can feel. But this is how the different parts of a page, speed experience from an user is split. So first the navigation begins, and that’s when when the first Core web vital is activated.
So time to first bite, then we have first paint, and that is the first non blank paint on a screen, meaning whenever you’re waiting for the screen to load, the first time that you see something on that page that is not white, from the moment that is loading to whenever you see that it’s already appearing on the on the website. Then you have the first console pane. So navigation has started.
You can now see the full page. You will notice many times when you and I encourage you always to, whenever you you are testing a website, to first go on a mobile and check it, because you will notice, as an user when something is not right. You will need none. You don’t need a tool to actually tell you.
That’s why, whenever you are analyzing Core web vitals, first thing first go and check the websites before you even put it in any tools. So it’s very common to see a big space between first paint and first content comes full paint, meaning first color and first way to navigate. Then the next one that we have is first minimum meaningful paint. So whenever something meaningful in the website, meaning a product, meaning a navigation, meaning something that the user can interact with, it starts appearing.
And finally, you have the visually ready. Whenever you can already start clicking with your finger, whenever you can already start playing with with your page, then you have time to interactive. That means whenever you can engage with a website, so you click an image to go to the product, and the product starts loading, and then finally, fully loaded.
Whenever you there’s no more changes happening in the websites. So all of these different steps are part of the Core web vitals. That’s why I said normally we organize it in three. But this is the full part of the first the first one which is page, it’s. Which is from opening the website to whenever the website is ready. All these can be measured, measured and is, and actually is measured by Google. And all of these will have a point in value based on the seconds that it takes to go from one to another. Is it making sense to so far,
Satabdi Mukherjee 15:24
yes, but this entire thing has to be less than five seconds. So each of
carmen domínguez rodríguez 15:29
these will, yeah. All of these have to be less than five seconds, which is is very little
Satabdi Mukherjee 15:41
dependent on how heavy the page you say, it has a lot of images. Does that increase?
carmen domínguez rodríguez 15:47
Yeah, it depends on the CCS in the it depends on JavaScript. It depends on how many banners you have. It depends on the images. There are a lot of techniques you can use to to I was going to say, manipulate it to improve this, like, for example, Lazy Load. Lazy Load is a technique that you include in your code that the image will only load whenever you are scrolling down, so you don’t need to wait for all the images to be loaded. And then this makes this whole process faster.
So there are quite a lot of techniques to improve this. But yeah, normally, is mainly affected by images and banners. So here the first full pane is, as I said, the metric that measures the time from when the page starts loading to when any part of the page content is rendered on the screen that the whole process that we have seen before, and this is first come to full pain, includes all the points that we have described before, in general.
Again, whenever you are talking to clients, you only talk about this one, but it’s very important for you as an SEO to understand all the different parts that go in the process, because in generally, it tends to be one of them that is affecting the other. And I’m going to tell you the most common one is from first pain to first counter full pain and from first meaningful pains to time to interactive. In my experience, those are the issues where I find them more often. Then largest control pains.
So this is when the biggest part of the website. So the part that is the most important for you how long it takes for it to load, and that is to load and to be ready for interaction, and why there is one only for the largest control pane, because if you have your website that starts showing in the top, it starts showing in the bottom, but it doesn’t show in the main part. That is where the user is going to see that is considered very bad for UX. In fact, it’s whenever you read that the description of Google or the Google recommendations, it says, always optimize everything that is within the viewport, within the most important part of the websites.
And that is why you tend to put lazy load for anything that is below the main, the main part of the page. And then you put priority if it is an image or is text, for it to be rendered whenever the website is rendered. So you’re giving the website enough time to render the rest of the things, but the main part is already rendered. So how to improve LCP?
So most, most of the times, SCP is impacted by slow server response times by rendering blocking JavaScript and CCS, so slow resource load times and client side rendering. So I’m saying a lot of words, but it’s exactly what you guys said earlier images. So slow resource load times means that it takes forever.
It takes a long time from the from the page, to ask for the Pro for the images that are in in the server and rendering blocking JavaScript and CCS is, whenever you have something that is blocking the JavaScript to put together a version, a render version of the image or of the product or whatever you’re showing. For example, if you have a lot of blocks, yes
Satabdi Mukherjee 19:15
to this, why would you have something that prevents rendering?
carmen domínguez rodríguez 19:21
To be honest, most of the times, websites are created by developers that they don’t understand that something is preventing rendering. Then they think, Oh, this is looking very beautiful.
Normally, images are complex that they move, for example, within the website, they tend to have a lot of CCS and rendering, but they also tend to be really heavy. And you also need to think a lot of things are already pre made within code. It comes already with a lot of blocking around it, or, by mistake, you can be, for example, blocking JavaScript in your Robot. txt, so the crawler cannot see some parts that are important. So there are a lot of reasons why it can. It can be created. And is, in fact, very, very common.
It tends to be render blocking. JavaScript tends to be the main reason to create bad LCP, super common. And the and the second one is images. I will say when it’s very common that whenever you’re building a website, there is no SEO, technical SEO around it, and people wouldn’t, wouldn’t understand how a web, for example, if you see enclosed you will have a lot of images that you want them to show, the model with top colors maximum quality, but maximum quality and top colors normally means very heavy imaginary.
So heavy, big imaginary means it takes longer to render and grow, and therefore affects this. There are a lot of things that we can do to improve it, but whenever you are doing audits, these are the main things that you need to look into. Then first input delay, yes,
Satabdi Mukherjee 20:59
one more question. What was the fourth point client side rendering?
carmen domínguez rodríguez 21:03
Whenever you the client has the own parts of the page in their server or in the content CMS, and the crawler needs to go to pick it, to grab it and show it, for example, whenever you have PDFs, or whenever you have anything extra that the client wants users to see. But it’s not very easy for the crawler to grab so there are a lot of things that you can do, like embedded embedding this, rather than having to ask the crawler to go to SMS to get it, or you can use an image and then click for download.
There are quite a lot of things that you can do to make it faster. So first input delay is actually the time, the time that goes from when a user first interacts with a page. So for example, you are in the home page and you see a product that you really want to see, and you click in there to the bro when they actually the browser starts processing what you have asked.
So from I click here to the action happening that is first input delay, and that is also a very common one. It takes sometimes, whenever you are in the home page, or you are one from one page, and you click a breaka to go back, that it takes a long time for it to load. That is first input delay, and it plays a big role as well in in Core web Vitals time to interactive TTI is part of first input. Delay is what comes right after, and many times, SEOs don’t play attention to it, but it’s also a quite important part of the whole core web vital optimization, and is the metric that measures the time from the page starts loading to when the main source resources have loaded and is capable and ready to respond to the to the input.
So in other words, once you have clicked and the action has started happening, is one. One day action has happened fully to the very end is another. So is the is the one that comes right after first input delay. And it’s also very important, because is we were just talking about resources, is very common that resources take longer to load.
And again, it’s something that you can solve with lazy lacing load, or the Lazy Load normally for images, but you can let the chrome, for example, let it render in slowly the rest of the website while the main part is rendered. So there are quite a lot of things that you can do, but this one is also a very important one to track. And finally, we have community layout shift.
And this for me, for a very long time, I have never seen it until once, I was doing this thing of going to the page and doing the first audit visually myself by clicking. And it’s when, when it takes longer for the images to find a space, or it doesn’t have enough space of the layout moves, etc. So the community, cumulative one, it puts all of them together.
So you have one individual layout shift and in one page or the whole of the website. Cumulative layout shift puts them all together and during the whole process of one user engaging with your sites, and again, as most of the times, it’s more important that they are fixed. Whenever is within the viewport, there are many times the things will happen in areas of the page that are not that important, but whenever they are in the main parts of the website. So.
In the in the main navigation, in the in the middle of the website, of the page for Google, is even more important. So what can you improve? For example, in case you haven’t understood this one is, well, is it clear this one before I go into how to fix it? Because for me, it was only until I saw it live that I understood fully. Yeah.
Okay, so here is an example of how sometimes you can see it affecting, for example, whenever you are clicking, you are trying to click a part in the website, but actually you click below and above, and it’s not working, and you need to click it a lot, a lot of times to be able to find it happens very often, and that’s because the images are uploaded with a domain dimension, so the crawler or the render is not able to identify when the image ends and finishes, so It doesn’t identify your click.
So the very easy way to actually fix it is by putting image with the right dimension, so with the recommended dimensions, and upload them in a way that Google can understand when to click. Also things that also affect this is whenever you have pop ups telling Oh, 30% discount if you join our newsletter. But if that pop up is actually not identified with the right dimensions, it might sometimes be really difficult to close it or to click on it, and it actually frustrate the users quite a lot, because I don’t, I don’t want, I’m just having a look.
I don’t want to join your news newsletter so you cannot click it out, you leave the page. And also quite a lot of action whenever you have a part in the website that required an action for it to act. That also is very frustrating and is very easy to fix, but just asking your developers to put an action so as a recommendation always, always whenever you create or you audit and this you can actually identify by crawling in Screaming Frog always include width and hate size attributes on your images and your video elements, as well as a schema we have talked about, schema top level before, never up to now in depth, and we’re going to have another only schema training.
But a schema plays a very important role for Google to understand the images and understand videos and understand the quality of those sometimes it will be easier to upload images without the attributes, and then pulling the attributes through a schema, depending on on the CMS that you have, I will always recommend to include the images with a while, with all the measures directly when you’re uploading it.
But a schema can also help provide all this information, and try to always include the right attribute in anything that you’re doing, because attributes will make Google render, and will make Google understand, or the crawler or chrome, in this case, understand things way easier, because you are telling them you’re spending for them so they don’t need to find information, and they can actually take the action faster, as always, since I have seen from day one, the more information that you give Google, the faster it Can it can act, and the faster it can act, the more time it will spend on your website. Is as easy as this. And then,
Satabdi Mukherjee 28:28
yes, how do you know what are the right width and height attributes to add?
carmen domínguez rodríguez 28:35
It will depend on your in in the website that you have. But in general, there it is in the recommendation of Google. So if you go to Google recommendations, it will tell you, depending on of the product page or depending the category page the right I would recommend. Oh, no, I’ve been talking with our queen here.
Satabdi Mukherjee 29:00
Oh, is Queen gone? We can see your screen.
carmen domínguez rodríguez 29:06
JaQueen, hello,
JaQueen McNair 29:12
hi. I dropped out of the other one. Oh, yeah, my computer wouldn’t work, so I was using the phone the whole time
carmen domínguez rodríguez 29:22
you haven’t seen anything in the presentation. I was like, Oh no,
JaQueen McNair 29:25
no, I can see and I can you’re so small. I was like, oh, so I’m trying to fix
carmen domínguez rodríguez 29:30
Good. Welcome back. So yeah, they recommended attributes. Normally, you can find them in Google, Google documentation. I And as I said, JavaScript is like big corporate number one, number one reason for websites to be slower is because of JavaScript. So on average, site school saves almost one second by just removing unused JavaScript. And it’s the same with CCS, unused JavaScript or things that can be optimized or reduced can save you a lot. And we’re saying we’re talking about one sec, which is what does nothing. But remember that is from one to five. So if you reduce one, you are from one to four, and you already know range versus red. So it’s always recommended whenever we do the audit, to start looking into in saving the quick wins, which is saving JavaScript. And the second one is, as I said, images. So depending on on what type of images you’re doing, and depending on where you your users normally come, the impact of images being optimized is going to be way, way higher. So 196 is a low time websites could save on average, by using response responsive images. And what I’m talking about responsive images is the Lazy Load Images that actually load in the right time in the right space as you are scrolling your website. For example, if you have ecommerce, that is the number one trick that I always recommend everyone. Whenever you if you have a category page and you have 100 products and you need to be scrolling in the viewport, you will have six maximum, right? So you can just load six per six per six per six rather than loading the demo. And that is something that you can just solve by having the images, and same with the load time, that you can say by optimizing images with the right size. So if you know that your the average size of a different of a phone is going to be, you know that most of your users come from your phone, from phone rather than desktop or tablet. Make sure that you are optimizing your web version with the right size for images first, that is normally will depend not even though Google has mobile first indexing. That doesn’t mean that most of your users will come from mobile. Is very often the for example, for SaaS, users will come from desktop. So if you are in SaaS, you might not necessarily need to follow all the size recommendations for mobile from Google first, but try to optimize the with the desktop size recommendations. Does it make sense? So you can see in Google Search Console and also in GA but in Google Search Console, you can see the main crawlers are actually crawling your size. So if you click in one page, it says Google bot, and it will tell you if it’s Google Desktop Box or Google Mobile bot. So you know which one is crawling you and you know which one to optimize first. And you also can look into where your audience is coming from, from GA four, right? You can see if they’re coming from desktop or they’re coming from mobile. And this one, which actually for me, was like, because I use out YouTube, the impact of blocking time when you have YouTube and when you don’t have YouTube is massive. So if you embed YouTube videos, it will have a massive impact. Now we know that YouTube videos are really important for engagement. We know that YouTube actually brings a lot of users as well. So how do you put them both together? Is is key. If you upload a video without using the right code or the right schema, this is the impact I can have. So that’s why, whenever you put in videos, make sure that you know how to do it. Lots of people just say, don’t use YouTube. Go to Vimeo or any other but frankly, YouTube, it has a lot of users. So not not using YouTube because it’s a It takes lots of time to load. It’s a bit of silly reason. Instead, find a way to put YouTube in a way that actually is fast and that is quite important. And I also, before we go here, I didn’t know if we will have time for this, but a few years ago, I did a talk on how improving your Core web Vitals have a massive impact on the environment, because the faster your website is, the less electricity that the crawlers needed to grow your site, and you end up saving quite a lot of energy from that otherwise, will have an impact in the environment. So after this, I will, I will put a link to to the talk I gave, because you can also learn quite a lot about how optimized core web vitals for a reason that is different to make your client rank higher, but for a reason that is good for humanity, before I move into how to crawl it and how to take decisions. Do you guys have any questions, because Core web vital, understanding them is difficult.
carmen domínguez rodríguez 34:56
Yes, Unzilla, how are you?.
Unzila Siddique 35:00
Hi, Carmen, I’m good. How have you been? It’s been a long week for me.
carmen domínguez rodríguez 35:04
Oh, how come
Unzila Siddique 35:08
just, you know, like preparing for the q4 and everything. It’s like, kind of also preparing for BFCM Black Friday and Cyber Monday. So there’s, like, a lot of things going on. Anyway, I wanted to ask something, um, we understand how core web vitals can affect the performance of our website and but we are usually not the ones who make website that’s developers part.
How necessary is it for me to know HTML, CSS and JavaScript, and to what extent, so that I can, you know, convey my message more easily, for example, like I found, when I try to talk to developers, I do not know the exact words that I should be using to explain things instead of go like, Oh, maybe, you know, you can, like, like, minimize the size or something. And they’re like, oh, it’s got this, and it’s called this, you know, like I don’t know the right terms, and obviously this hinders my communication with them, and often times, what happens is that things get deprioritized and results take time.
carmen domínguez rodríguez 36:37
It is a magnificent question. It’s really good question. You don’t need to speak like the dev language to show the impact. You can show the impact by showing a video. So for example, we’re talking about this part. Well, normally, what I do actually, is go to them and explain these issues.
And you don’t need to to explain exactly how to solve it. You need to say this for Google, is very important. And at the moment, this, this and this part are not performing. And I’m going to show you a bit how you can, you can actually visualize it better. But the most important bit is that you say you you show them, show the parts that are red and show the impact. For example, I was saying it’s very common whenever you do a Core webVitals audit that everything is red, but many times, not everything will have an impact in your users. Sometimes you are doing changes because you want everything to look green.
But sometimes the changes actually will have an impact in users leaving and websites converting less. So, for example, if you know that, let’s go back to the data here, you know that you have a bounce, that you have a set of pages are really slow. You know that that set of pages is actually leading to a lot of people leaving the website, because you will have that data from Google Search Console, or, sorry, from GA not from Google Search Console. So you get the set of pages that are affected by any of the Core web vitals.
You get the data into the balance rate of people living. And you say, I want to reduce this boundary bounce rate. I know that this bound rate might be caused by this, this, and this, this is an image or a video that that proves it. And I’ll, I’ll show you in a in a minute, how to take this video. And then you tell them, can you please fix it?
Because actually we are losing this amount of money. Now how do you calculate the amount of money that you’re losing? If you have a set pages that from from gfor are giving you a certain amount of money revenue, and you know that if you have more traffic, you will have more revenue. So if you were to reduce the bounce rate by a certain percent, that will mean more traffic, and that will potentially mean more conversion, therefore more money. So that’s the way that you can convince a mere case study, I’m losing this amount of money because these Core web vitals are not affected. That is my theory.
We can either fix these issues and try to get more money or not fix them and they prioritize them in general. You know this very well in sila people, you need to talk to people in terms of numbers or data, and I think it’s the easiest way to do it. You don’t need to ask them exactly what they need to fix, because you’re going to be able to provide them here with the issues that you have.
So if you use the lighthouse and you get the pages that have your issues, you’re going to be able to tell them, send this to them. These are the problems. Please fix them, and that’s how you can prioritize them. As I said, following the same logic, if you have an issue in your home. Page that are related to core web vitals.
That’s massive, because Google is going to be using the home page as the main indicator of your of your core web vitals. So the first thing that you need to fix is a home page. And then whenever you are you have a page based on the revenue that they give you. You prioritize. This is, this is the main thing that you need to do.
And still, rather than sending everything. Because if you go to your developers and send everything that is wrong without telling them why, and without prioritizing, they’re gonna see, oh, a lot of work. I’m gonna do something else. So that is slowly, with your priority and your logic, how you need to convince developers. And this is this one in terms of changes, is the one thing that you guys as SEOs won’t be able to fix. There are quite a lot of things that you can fix as SEOs.
You can fix the meta you can fix canonicals, if you have the right access. But this here is the one that you really need dev to do, and that’s why you need to be smart whenever you’re talking to them and although also the classic one, then praise them a lot whenever they fix them, and you can see the impact of the things that they fix, shout out at them, tell them how great they did, and make it public.
The more public you make, the good work that they made, the more chances that they’re going to help you in the next time this is a more of a how do you call it emotional intelligence rather than SEO intelligence information?
Unzila Siddique 41:28
Absolutely, that’s how that’s how you role in corporate.
carmen domínguez rodríguez 41:33
That is, and recently, the reason why I really like your question. Recently, I was talking about this with a guy, Andrew is a very good SEO I don’t remember his surname. Remember very bad with names, and he was talking about how SEOs cannot struggle a lot to find a way to show the value of the work that they do. And to be honest, is because I think SEOs have never been told to show the value until now, and most of the time, SEOs were in the background making some changes.
But now that it is becoming more complex, because you need to look after Core web, vitals, you need to look up technical SEO contents, AI, images. So it’s becoming more and more complex, more and more difficult, and you need to, therefore, in in order to make changes and justify the changes, find a way to prove it.
And no one has been told how to prove this. That’s why data analysis is really important, and why understanding how to roll in corporate, as you said, is very important, because otherwise you might not make, take your changes done. Oh, sorry, people don’t, might not make your changes, and therefore you don’t, you don’t show the value of the work that you’re doing, which I also, if we have time, I would love to show you how to do it in another in another training. I keep saying lots of things I want to show you guys, and I don’t know if we’re going to have the time. Yes,
Unzila Siddique 43:04
okay, so since I’m actively looking for a job right now, I come across job listings that mentioned that you should have working knowledge of HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Obviously it’s not possible for me to be a front end developer while I’m working full time. But you know is, is there, like, an extent to which I can, like, broaden my knowledge so I’m able to understand, like, I’m able to fit the job description.
carmen domínguez rodríguez 43:43
I mean, be careful withUnzila because a classic thing is that they start asking SEOs to be geniuses. Soon enough, they got to ask you how to create AI tools. I think SEO sometimes get asked too many things, and it’s not fair, and I wouldn’t want you to be putting too much pressure on yourself because of job descriptions. Is also very important that you identify when a job description is a toxic one and a bullshit one, and sorry for saying bad words, but it’s very common.
You are not expected to know JavaScript, you are not expected to know CCS. You are not expected to know Python. You are not expected to know regex. Now that doesn’t mean that you know you don’t have the basics, because obviously, the more basics you have, the easier is going to be for you to identify issues.
I cannot write JavaScript and I cannot write HTML bus. If I go to a code and I know that I’m meant to be put in hreflan and the hreflang has a wrong code, I need to be able to identify it. So you can either use tools to identify when something is. On in the code, or learn a little bit the basics. But don’t think that learning the basics mean learning how to write HTML, because it’s really difficult.
And if you do decide, because I know a lot of SEOs that have decided to do boot camps to learn how to be developers, if you do decide, it’s because you you want to be better, not because a job description is asking you to do it, because then we start honestly. I’ve seen for my role, I’ve seen job descriptions. I was almost a full department in one role. So yeah, I’m, as I said last time. I’m happy to if you need help, happy to to kind of guide you in whatever you need with the job descriptions and writings push or request for your in your interviews, but be careful.
Unzila Siddique 45:56
Thank you so much. I will definitely connect with you on a few things that I’ve been struggling with during my interviews these days, I think I would like, kind of like with a bit of guidance on how to tackle some questions that I do not know the answers to.
carmen domínguez rodríguez 46:16
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I said the last time I’m still open you just write to me whenever you want to, to talk and we can discuss. So the different options that you have at the moment where you want to go to how to respond on something, so I’m more than happy to help you.
Unzila Siddique 46:32
Yeah, thank you.
carmen domínguez rodríguez 46:33
No worries. Okay, so yes,
JaQueen McNair 46:39
thank you. And sorry for the question. I like how you told us about how, if we send them too many problems the dev team, then they might be like, oh, you know, it’s too much. And I’ll do that later.
And I have ran into that, and so I wonder, do you suggest sending that full spreadsheet with the audit review to someone else and then kind of breaking it up for the dev team? Because since you’re saying, like, the core web vitals is really the one thing that we can’t do, should that be the only part that we really send them
carmen domínguez rodríguez 47:25
to begin with? No. So it’s a very good question. The first, the first thing that you need to do is understand, do you need to talk directly to developers, or do you need to talk to a one developer lead that this is out the work? That’s the first thing that you need to find out. Whenever you you find that out, you need to have that template, the technical SEO template that I sent you originally, that one also has a part for PageSpeed. So if you remember, we only focus on the one, the ones coming from Google Search Console.
Today I’m going to show you how to look into some of the PageSpeed issues. Well, and the next time in the next training, we’re going to go through that as well. That needs to go to the same technical spreadsheet. In that technical SEO spreadsheet, you need to prioritize. So you need to organize the things are for you, the things are for your developer, and then prioritize there based on the return that is going to give you. So based on the return, sometimes core web vitals are very important.
Sometimes they are not, even though they are red, it will really depend on how bad all the things are and how bad core web vitals are. So if your core web vitals are so slow that no one wants to go to your website. Yes, you prioritize that, but if they are green, red, orange, mostly green and orange, you leave that to the end and focus on the most important bits. As an technical SEO, that is the most important skill that you have, have to have understanding which are the ones that have priority.
And I said that’s a technical SEO as an SEO, because it’s very common that you find so many issues that you feel overwhelmed, and you try to tackle all of them all at once. If you do that, I can guarantee you that you’re going to fail because you cannot tackle all of them. So that’s the first thing.
Put all the issues in your spreadsheets, do all your audits, your your technical SEO, your page speed, insights, all the all of them. Put all of them in one site, and then go priority, non priority, meaning priority opportunity. And from there you start moving. And then from there you start allocating to to your developers. Okay, these are my priority ones. You go to talk to the dev, to the team lead, or to the dev, these are my priority issues. How fast can you work on them? Do you understand them? Can I help you with more context?
This is what Google recommends. This is what I recommend. Can I create a JavaScript, a JIRA? Ticket for you, please give me an update. That’s the process I will follow. Thank you. Thank you so much, and I can also guide you to a training on how to create awesome JIRA tickets for your developers as well, because some, I think talking to devs, it tends to be the most difficult part, because they don’t, they tend to not like SEOs very much.
One, because we give them what more work. Two, because we are critical of the work and and three is because many times SEO just get whatever they come they get from the screaming fraud, copy and paste and send it to them, and they don’t understand, they don’t understand what we’re saying, because we are no SEOs. So translating all of this is very important to communicate with devs. I need to remember, after this, I’ll send that. That very good talk Gus. I don’t remember his name. I’m very bad with names. Did it in Brighton SEO, and I really liked it, so I’ll find it for you.
JaQueen McNair 51:05
Thank you.
carmen domínguez rodríguez 51:07
Cool. Any other questions, and today, you guys are asking very good questions. Well, you always ask very good questions, but I’m particularly liking today questions. So how to test core web vitals. In this area that I put in here, you can find all Google tools, because Google has a lot of them to for you to run and test them.
The mind the first one is the lighthouse. So in the lighthouse you actually you can download videos on on the issues, you can download screen screenshots of the issues, and it will explain what the issue is, and then a technical description for your depth. The only problem with the lighthouse is that you need to be checking page by page, but you don’t need to check per se, page by page, but you need to check template by template.
For example, if you have E commerce I always use the same example. You check your home page, you check your category page, your check your product pages, and then you check the rest and then you can find things are common in those pages. The lighthouse scoring calculator will tell you all of the issues in general, and will tell you which ones you need to fix by putting all the pages together and then telling you the scoring of fixing them.
So here is more technical, more detail, more specific to show clients and theirs. So why am I saying clients? Because many, many, many times clients won’t understand what you’re talking about. When you talk about core web vitals, they are like, What the hell are you saying? So you need to visualize it. You need to make it obvious for them, and you need to compare your page with a page that is good, so they can see how slow it is whenever it covering.
And you can find this in here. This the lighthouse, will show you how long it takes and at what time it goes wrong, because it will show the the seconds on top, and it will show every single step of the of the process. And we know that anything beyond five is bad. So if you are seeing the process and you start going to 10 seconds, please, it happens, you can tell your client, why is that the oh, this is actually not the high the this is not the lighthouse. This page speed. I didn’t update this. I’ll update it for when I send the presentation. But this is page speeds and page speeds.
It also gives you information, but a little bit more visual and less technical versus the lighthouse. You can use this whenever you are talking to clients, or whenever yourself you’re trying to track things. A very cool report, though, that you can use, and you can create it easily in locker studio, and I do this with clients all the time, is the crooks reports.
So in the crooks report, you basically pick here in this URL, you can click in there, and we’ll show you. I will anyway, show you how to use it in the next session as well, because we’re going to go through site sidebar, Screaming Frog, Google Search Console and all of them. But here, if you follow the instructions, you will get a locker studio. The updates every month, and you can check on a monthly basis how your Core web Vitas have improved.
So here in the first page, you will show you the summary of the main ones, but you can see in all in here you have all of them, all the ones that we have gone through. And you can can compare on a monthly basis, so you can show your clients the work that you’re doing and how it’s improving. And then this one see that you can use it to then show the performance and the revenue tied with the work that you’re doing. This one is really good, particularly, again, I use it for E commerce all the time.
When I was filtering by product pages, I showed them how the product pages were improving, and then I tied the. New from the product pages coming coming from them. So this one is really good and very easy to put together, and even you can automate it to be sent to to clients on a monthly basis, for them to control it, or to developers for them to have a look at them every every month.
So that’s it for today in terms of initiation on Core web vitals. In the next section, we’re going to go how to analyze Core web vitals, how to put a presentation with the videos, how to do the process of including it in the tech audit. And you know, guys, you have an task for me, which is doing a presentation of the of your tech audits.
This will be included in the in the presentation. And again, this is not mandatory. This is Volunteer. Volunteer. You are volunteering to do it if you want me to give you feedback. But this will go to the spreadsheet and to the final presentation that you’re doing on your pages. Any questions before I stop recording?
carmen domínguez rodríguez 56:17
Was it I didn’t stop recording? I stopped presenting. I.
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