Tips to Create a Customer Experience Website Google Will Love
Happy Customers Are More Likely to Buy
In today’s online world, making customers happy starts with how they experience your online presence. Your website’s experience is so essential that the world’s largest search engine Google is evaluating every website for user experience (UX).
Google has set priorities for websites on how they deliver to viewers. It will score every page for Core Values. The search engine giant has established five measurements, each with an undecipherable label, that every website must meet. The algorithm measures how easy it is for a visitor to experience your page.
Page ranking is going the way of the Dodo bird. Search engines look for ways websites help site visitors navigate the site and access information.
What is User Experience?
User experience encompasses all aspects of the end-user's interaction with the company, its services, and its products. What that means for your business website is every page must provide an easy to navigate and use experience for your site visitor.
The Big Five
Google evaluates the page experience for the user. Before visitor gets to the text, how easy it is for someone to experience the page? Google created five important measurements to gage how a page provides a good user experience.
1 Core Web Vitals
Google set guidance for quality signals that are essential to delivering a great user experience on the web. The three main qualities are loading, interactivity, and visual stability. In other words, Google is checking to see how easy it is for someone to see your page.
Don’t be put off by the labels, just understand what they mean.
Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) - How long the page takes to load before the visitor can access the content. The point in the page load timeline when the main content is likely to have loaded is how load speed is measured. A delay of only one second in loading time
can decrease conversion rates by 7%. Google recommends three seconds as a best practice.
Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) - When interaction with the page feels real to the user. This is the time from when a user first interacts with a page to the time when the browser begins to process that interaction.First Input Delay (FID) - The page feels stable and doesn’t wiggle, wobble, or jump. Visual stability should prevent irritating and unexpected movement of page content.
2 Mobile Friendliness
The page performs in the same manner no matter what mobile device the user is on——Android, iPhone, iPod, tablet, etc. The website works the same across devices.
3 HTTPS Data
Your site should have secure technology that enables encrypted communication in the form of an SSL certificate. Have you ever gone to a website and the search bar says, not secure? That means the data is not secure.
4 No Intrusive Popups
Popups are called interstitials. If an interstitial covers the page on a mobile device, the user is kept from seeing the information they want. You can have a small popup in a corner, but it can’t cover the entire page preventing the viewer from seeing what they came to the page to see.
5 Safe Browsing
Keep your site free of malware, harmful downloads or deceptive content.
If you want to discover more about how the user experience affects your website, usability.gov offers a library of information to help you understand and implement a great user experience.
Content is Still the High Measure
Keep these search factors in mind for your website, but content is still the best opportunity for search results and ranking. You want your site visitor to have a good experience with your website, so make it easy for them to get to and read your content.
Once your website is easy to use, great content that answers customer questions is your ticket to reaching happy customers.
Image Marta Filipczyk on Unsplash
