Last fall, Google announced that a new ranking factor was coming in May of 2021. It’s called the page experience update.
In recent years, we’ve all been focusing on site speed. Getting our content to load quickly before families back up and head to the next senior living community on the search engine results page was the biggest deal.
Now Google is telling us to prepare for more than actual site speed…
The Google crew says that, “Great page experiences enable people to get more done and engage more deeply; in contrast, a bad page experience could stand in the way of a person being able to find the valuable information on a page.”
What is the Page Experience Update?
There are three factors every senior living provider will need to focus on.
Google refers to them as Core Web Vitals.
While they aren’t at all interesting or exciting to read about, you should at least have a basic understanding of each one so you can make sure your web company is on top of it early.
Google Core Web Vitals Explained for Senior Living
Here’s the skinny on each one:
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LCP: Largest Contentful Paint: This core vital looks not at how long it takes your site to fully load, but how long it takes the most important piece to appear for visitors. If you can get this part of your page to load more quickly, such as by optimizing the main image, it can feel like your whole site is faster than it is. That improves the page experience. This one is fairly easy to understand, right?
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FID: First Input Delay: The title of this core vital isn’t friendly-sounding to those outside the tech community. It really just means Google is considering how responsive your site is to a visitor’s first interaction. We’ve all been there with sites that seem to load quickly. But when you try to interact with it, crickets. Nothing works. No response. You sit and wait. And wait. Super annoying. And now it’s something Google is factoring in to your rank.
- CLS: Cumulative Layout Shift: We think web developers and SEO folks are like lawyers. They use language that is far more confusing than it needs to be, so you need to hire them to interpret. That’s how this one is. What Google wants to know here is how much the stuff on your page moves around as it’s loading. It’s another one of the things that irk seniors and their families when they visit your site. Let’s say an adult child is looking for assisted living. They land on your home page and see the word “assisted living” as an option and click. Then your page jumps around and what they really ended up clicking on is “memory care.” It takes them down the rabbit hole to memory care, a type of senior living they aren’t at all interested in. Don’t let your site do that, okay?
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While this is obviously a very simplified version of core vitals, it gives you a good foundation.
Make sure you talk with your web team about this Google update planned for May of 2021.
Judging by the unheard of amount of lead time they’ve given us to prepare, it’s an important one.
Drop us a note if you have questions about your senior living content or strategy. It’s all we do all day, every day!