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- [00:00]
Podcast Announcer
The Voices of Search Podcast is a proud member of the I Hear Everything Podcast Network. Looking to launch or scale your podcast, I Hear Everything delivers podcast production, growth and monetization solutions that transform your words into profit. Ready to give your brand a voice then visit iheareverything.com welcome to the Voices of Search Podcast. A member of the I Hear Everything Podcast network, ready to expedite your company's organic growth efforts. Sit back, relax, and get ready for your daily dose of search engine optimization wisdom. Here's today's host of the Voices of Search Podcast, Jordan Cooney.
- [00:43]
Jordan Cooney
Hello marketers and SEOs. My name is Jordan Cooney from Pre Visible and today we're going to discuss technical SEO and user experience. Joining me today is Matthew Edgar, who is the partner and technical SEO consultant at Elementive. Elementive is a data driven digital marketing agency that helps businesses optimize their online presence and drive measurable results. Today, Matthew and I are going to discuss how core web vitals affects SEO.
- [01:13]
Podcast Announcer
This podcast is also sponsored by Ahrefs. What if I told you that you could monitor your website's SEO health backlinks and organic rankings at no costs? Sounds too good to be true. Well, it's not, because my friends at Ahrefs just launched Ahrefs Webmaster Tools. Ahrefs new Webmaster Tools product quickly helps you improve your site's visibility by pointing solutions to over 100 technical issues that might be holding your search performance down. Plus, AWT monitors for backlinks so you'll know the most linked to pages and how those links are affecting your rankings. And AWT shares what keywords your website ranks for and compares how you stack up against competitors for key metrics like search volume, keyword difficulty and traffic value. Look, monitoring your website used to require multiple expensive tools, and now, thanks to Ahrefs, that's not the case anymore because AWT will help you monitor your SEO, health, backlinks and keywords for free. And no, it's not one of those 14 day free trial offers. It's a powerful site audit tool that will keep working for you for free. So check out Ahrefs webmaster tools@ahrefs.comAWT that's a H R E F S.comAWT okay.
- [02:32]
Jordan Cooney
Here'S my conversation with Matthew Edgar, the partner and technical SEO consultant at Elementive. Matthew, welcome to the Voice to Search podcast.
- [02:41]
Matthew Edgar
Hello. Thanks for having me on.
- [02:43]
Jordan Cooney
Yeah, absolutely thrilled to have a technical expert on. We get some technical experts on the pod, but you know, the reality is that there's no shortage of technical SEO needs. And we're in the midst of a core web vitals expansion, so that'll be probably a fun topic for us to dive into. But before we get into that, can you tell us a little bit about Elementive and your background in the SEO space?
- [03:06]
Podcast Announcer
Yeah.
- [03:06]
Matthew Edgar
So my background is I actually started as a programmer, and then about 10 to 15 years ago, I started shifting into the SEO side of things and realizing that clients really needed help figuring out how does Google crawl your website, how does Google index your site? Really looking at the technical factors that play into that. And core vitals is obviously a part of that, but there's so many other factors on the technical side of things and at Elementive, that's what we do. We help clients out with the technical side of SEO. Digging into how does Google crawl the site, where do problems exist and what do you need to do to fix that?
- [03:40]
Jordan Cooney
Awesome. Love it. So today we're going to be talking about core web vitals and how it affects SEO, Right? And I'm going to start with maybe a meaty topic because. Or meaty question I might have to say, because the reality is that core web vitals has a lot of misconceptions, maybe. And one of the questions that I hear often is that core web vitals is the biggest driver of rankings or core web vitals is. Is going to impact my rankings or drive better rankings. Can you tell us a little bit about how core web vitals and rankings work and connect to one another?
- [04:20]
Matthew Edgar
So it's definitely never going to be the biggest ranking factor. And I would agree that's one of the misconceptions I hear. And I think John Mueller actually recently talked about this earlier this year, and he, I think, hit the nail on the head for why it's one of the few things in SEO that we actually have a metric for that we can actually point to and we can actually optimize against. So we can say, my LCP is 2.5 seconds and I can get closer to that, and that's nice. That's an easier thing to go after. So I get the appeal of wanting to optimize that because you have a tangible target you can work toward. But the truth of the matter is that while it matters to a certain extent, it is not the most important ranking factor. It is not going to be the thing that makes the biggest difference for where your website shows up or how much traffic your website gets. And if you think about it, with what Google is trying to do, it kind of Makes sense. Google's not going to rank a low quality website with all kinds of issues just because it ranks fast. What Google will do is they will say, hey, we have a really good website and it also happens to be really fast, so maybe we'll give that a little bit of a boost or give that a little bit of a bonus to it. So you want to think about core of vitals and I'd say speed more broadly when it comes to SEO as that thing that can kind of help a good website do just a little bit better, it's not going to be the thing that makes the biggest difference. And I've seen this play out with tons of clients over the years where they get fixated on core vitals and they want to improve it and they do. And you see there's notable gains with conversions, there's notable gains with site engagement, there's improvements to be had there, but their rankings don't really change.
- [06:00]
Jordan Cooney
Right.
- [06:01]
Matthew Edgar
And that fits like that. That's where speed would actually come into play. That's where speed's going to make the biggest differences with users, not so much with Google directly.
- [06:11]
Jordan Cooney
Absolutely. And so I think the best places to start off on this conversation then is Google's made it very clear that it's important though, right. You've got entire sections of Google search console dedicated to core web vitals and page experience. You have tons of documentation. Google has donated tens of millions of dollars to a nonprofit focused exclusively on core web vitals. So why is it so important?
- [06:37]
Matthew Edgar
I think the importance of it comes down to the impact on user experience and the impact on how it helps users. Because where you actually see the gains, and Google even talks about this in their documents, where if you improve LCP by this amount, you can see this lift in conversions, or if you improve this other metric, you improve cumulative layout shift, you can see improvements in user engagement times, or you can see that people stay on the page longer. And I think what it really points to is genuinely Google cares about creating better experiences on websites and they want to do their part to incentivize people to create those better experiences. Speed is a part of that. It's not the only part of user experience. There's a lot of factors that go into UX for sure, but speed's a part of that. And I think that's where Google is probably looking at it predominantly is from that standpoint and saying, hey, these things help user experience. They might help SEO too, but they genuinely want to create better websites that when people click from a search result to that website, it's not going to be a terrible experience for the visitor, no question.
- [07:44]
Jordan Cooney
And I think this is where it gets kind of really fun for SEO and we web developers and engineers. Right. Is that the core ethos of these core web vitals, the core ethos of these KPIs, is to give clarity around experience, is to give clarity around what the user is going to go through when they're on these pages and how it's going to impact the way that they consume the content, information, knowledge and assets that are available to them. Right. That experience then connects to SEO.
- [08:15]
Matthew Edgar
Yep.
- [08:16]
Jordan Cooney
And so I'd love for you to talk about how that connects to SEO and why it connects to SEO. Why. Why does experience for users at its core facilitate SEO and SEO results?
- [08:29]
Matthew Edgar
I think the best way to kind of think about that and the way I talk about it with clients all the time is that it comes down to SEO is really a part of user experience. I've never really thought of SEO as a part of marketing necessarily. I think SEO is part of the user experience because the user experience starts. Somebody's looking for information that you happen to have on your site and that's going to start on Google. Google effectively becomes an extension of your website on relevant search results. And if you think about it in that context, then the entirety of the user experience includes Google. So the experience people have is going to start on a search result, then it's going to land on your website. And when people land on your website, you want that to be a good experience. And so I think as we think about SEO and as we think about how UX and SEO connect together, if you bring those two pieces together in that way and you kind of picture it that way, where it is connected, then it starts to make sense that Google is going to prioritize things that do make for a better experience. And this is true of core vitals. It's also true of helpful content update. It's true going years back when they prioritize mobile usability factors, you see that with them rolling out SSL certificates and other things across the board, Google wants to create a good experience both on their site with search results, but then also create a good experience on the website that people are clicking to because they're really part of the same experience.
- [09:55]
Jordan Cooney
Yeah, I mean, well said. And I think there's a lot to unpack behind that response. Right. One of the interesting things, when you get really into the nitty gritty of not only core web vitals, but Ultimately, what is experience and how you measure experience. Right. You sometimes get those smart people who then say, oh, we should build our website just like Google. And it's like, well, no, we should build our website for the experience that our users and our customers and our community needs. Right? So yeah, that's the interesting thing is that we're not trying to replicate what Google's doing. We're trying to replicate what the core audience that we're trying to reach is looking for, for sure.
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Matthew Edgar
And the one thing that I see few sites doing, and I would say not enough sites doing, is actually doing user testing. And that to me is the most important way to understand, yes, your user experience, but understand your SEO as well. And when I've done user testing in the past for clients, yes, user test your website, see what kind of experiences they want there directly, but also user test the Google search results for different keywords. You're thinking about what kind of experience do people have on those search results? Do people want to click on those search results? What are people's intentions behind that search and so on. And you want to test all those different aspects of the user experience. So that way you can understand, you know, where Google's website ends, where your website needs to begin, how much of Google's experience you need to bring into your site, if you do need to have more search type experiences on your site, or if it needs to be something else entirely. Because you're right, a lot of sites do end up trying to. They mimic Google or they mimic. You see them mimicking social media.
- [11:30]
Jordan Cooney
The belief too.
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Matthew Edgar
Yeah, yeah, totally.
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Jordan Cooney
Or the belief that this is what Google wants us to do, right?
- [11:35]
Matthew Edgar
Yeah, yeah. And that's just not what Google wants. They want you to create a good experience. Like you said, it's figure out what those use cases are for your site. And to me, the only way you can figure that out, really, I mean, yeah, you can go through your quantitative data and Google Analytics, figure out GA4 and you can get those metrics, but assuming you can, you can get really good information from there. But you've got to do the qualitative side too. And the best way to do that is through actually talking to people and see what kind of experience they want.
- [12:03]
Jordan Cooney
100%. So let's just dive a little bit further into core web vitals and as SEOs. How should we be thinking about core web vitals today? What metrics should we be focused on and what are the priorities as SEOs when it comes to diving into this collection of KPIs and metrics that are core web vitals.
- [12:29]
Matthew Edgar
So I would say there's kind of three levels that you probably want to look at it. The first level is you got to just look at what the numbers are currently. So look at PageSpeed Insights for your website and see what the field data is coming back as. And for a lot of websites, you're going to have field data on there. Field data is from real people who are using your website over the last 28 days in Google Chrome. See what kind of experience they have. This will give you the best look at how people are actually interacting with your website. Are they on slow connection speeds? Are they on slow devices? Are they struggling to load the website? If they're struggling, then you know you've got some specific issues on here and you can use in PageSpeed Insights or you can look at other Chrome user experience reports. You can see what percentage of people are having problems with these metrics. That's the first step. You got to look at those and understand what's going on out in the real world for real visitors coming to your website. But then you need to go one level deeper than that and you need to understand what are the metrics that are behind those core vitals metrics. And so you look at something. I'll pick on Largest contentfullpaint. Well, there's a lot of dependencies on Largest contentfullpaint starting with the very first connection to the website. So if largest contentfullpaint is high, don't try and optimize Largest contentfullpaint until you understand, okay, what's going on with first content Full paint, what's going on with time to first byte? What's going on with DOM content loaded, what's going on with these other metrics? So you have to understand some of those things. And then once you understand that next level down of okay, what are the metrics behind core of vitals? What are those leading indicators that there might be problems? Then you can go one level deeper and you can say, okay, well what's causing that? So maybe largest contentful paint is high because First Content full paint is high. And first contentful paint is high because time to first bite is high. Okay, how do you fix time to first bite? And then you can start digging in from there. I think that's the way to look at it is that I see too many people just stay on the surface and they just try and focus on how do I make INP faster, lcp, cls, all these core vitals numbers faster. But you got to dig a little bit deeper into, okay, well what's behind that? Because those metrics are all at the end of the website loading. Those metrics are all late stage metrics that come in and tell you something about how the website is operating long after somebody has requested the website, long after the website has started processing. You've got to understand those earlier stages to be able to really understand how to fix core vitals and how to improve them.
- [15:01]
Podcast Announcer
Time for a one minute break to hear from our sponsor, Pre Visible. So you're looking for SEO help and you got a couple of options. You could start replying to spam from agencies that claim they can get you to rank number one on Google. You can pay an hourly rate for a consultant who will inevitably nickel and dime you with hourly charges. Or you can work with a cookie cutter agency to quickly launch a strategy less project with low success rates. None of those sound very good now do they? Well, that's where Pre Visible's integrated consulting model comes in. Pre Visible draws From a collective 40 years of SEO and digital marketing experience to unlock your organic growth opportunities. They build custom solutions that combine strategy, technical expertise, content and reporting to effectively operationalize SEO for your business. Pre Visible's four stage approach ensures that your SEO programs thrive by starting off with a strategy first approach. Then they support you in your efforts to create quality content, help you identify technical issues, and most importantly, they'll work with your cross functional teams to integrate your SEO strategies to make sure that your SEO budget actually drives results, not just your agency's bottom line. So join brands like Yelp, eBay, Canva, Atlassian Square, all who rely on the SEO consultants at Pre Visible. For more information, go to Previsible IO. That's Pre Visible. P R E V I S I B L E I O.
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Jordan Cooney
No doubt. I mean, I think that's the uniqueness about Corova. And one of the great challenges is that collectively we're getting some signals from Google, right? We're getting some information through Google Search Console or even from some of our third party tools that are telling us how to these various next level metrics break down. Right? And so the reality is though, that though the metric itself, the data point itself isn't the solution, it's not even the identification of the problem, right? And so how do we get there? And I think that's where a lot of SEOs get hung up, is they take a screenshot of something they found in Search Console that says that, you know, there's an issue with the First Contentful paint and you know, it gives you a script of a code on it and they take a screenshot of that, send it to the developer and the developer looks at and goes like, what is this?
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Matthew Edgar
Right, right.
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Jordan Cooney
So how do you get to the place of identifying the problem so we can get to the solution?
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Matthew Edgar
Yeah, I would actually say in this case Google's tools are not what you want to be using. I tend to find Google's tools are great for getting that high level look, but they don't give you enough detail to really understand why. So one of the tools that I recommend and I use all the time is webpagetest. I think it is one of the best tools to let you dig in and you can get really clear ideas of how things are loading. So you look at and say, okay, I have cumulative layout shift issues. Well, why is that? Well, WebpageTest is going to tell you not only what is it that's shifting specifically and how much it's shifting, it's going to tell you when that shifting is happening it in the loading process. And then once you know when it's shifting you can look and say, oh well, it's when this JavaScript file's coming in, when this CSS file is coming in, when this image is coming in. Now you have something specific, you have something tangible, you can go to a developer and say, okay, I know I have an LCP issue and I know it happens at the time that this JavaScript file is coming in and I know that it's connected to this. Then you can go one level deeper with that, with a developer very easily and say, okay, well what is it about that JavaScript file? What is it about that image? How do we change that loading process? Comes a little bit easier to diagnose that there's other more specific tools you can use. I think webpagetest is usually pretty good for having that kind of diagnostic look at things and it takes you one level deeper than Page Feed insights. Well, certainly deeper than what Google Search Console will, where you can actually really start understanding precisely how things are loading when precisely problems are representing themselves.
- [19:00]
Jordan Cooney
Yeah, no doubt. I think you're absolutely right with the advice that there's a next layer in terms of the tooling, whether if you're at an enterprise enterprise and you have some of this natively built into your ecosystem with platforms like datadog and others that can give you direction in terms of what is happening, in terms of performance and experience or even more broadly, you might be at a small organization, you have to Use other tool sets to really break down what is the real problem. To go to the engineer, to go to the development team, to go to the product team and say, hey, this is how I'm seeing the problem. And then collectively get to the next piece of this conversation, which is how do we come up with solutions?
- [19:41]
Matthew Edgar
Right? And that's where you won't be able to come up with solutions if you're not using the right tools, if you're not digging in deeply enough, even Page Speed Insights is going to give you a list of here's things we recommend. But those recommendations aren't actionable, really. I mean, it will tell you, oh, your HTML size is too big. Great, how do I fix that? What is the HTML? Where's the problem at? I don't know. Based on that, you've got to use something that's going to give you more actionable insight. I think if you do use tools like webpageTester, you don't necessarily need to be a developer to figure those things out. You can step through, you can look at things. At some level, you're going to need to talk to a developer, you're going to need to go through and look at the code specifically, but you want to be able to get to the most actionable point you can with things.
- [20:31]
Jordan Cooney
Absolutely. So Matthew, in closing this episode, I'd like to get your perspective for our listeners who are maybe newer to SEO or individuals who are just getting maybe really into core web vitals or technical SEO. Where do you start? How do you start the learning journey of core web vitals? These page experience KPIs. Where do you start that learning journey so that you can be an effective SEO in supporting, in solutioning within this expertise in SEO?
- [21:06]
Matthew Edgar
For corevital specifically, I would say start by understanding how a website loads. Understand the website loading process because that's all speed is measuring. It's measuring how does the website load. And you just want to follow through the website loading process from, you know, all the different steps that happen between when the website is initially requested all the way to the end of the process. And the more you can understand that loading process, you can step through and say, okay, this happens, then this happens and this happens, and so on. You'll get a better sense of how the website is being constructed, how the website is being built and then you can start layering in the metrics. Okay, I know what this process is. I know it's A, B, C. And now I understand that this metric measures step to on the process and that gives you, I think, better context for it. If you go the other direction, you try and just start by understanding the metrics, they're not going to have any context. And I think by getting that context, by getting that grounding of how does a website load, how does it move from the initial stages to the end, then you can have that context to understand what the metrics actually mean and what they actually tell you. And the more you dig into that, the better you'll have that context in there. And you can start very broadly. Mozilla's developer network MDN has some great documents about how the website loads and they walk you through that, and they walk you through it at different levels. For people who are just starting out, to people who have degrees in computer science, the entire spectrum is really covered there.
- [22:37]
Jordan Cooney
Awesome. And that's a great place for us to wrap up this episode of the Voice to Search podcast. Thank you to Matthew Edgar, technical SEO Consultant and partner at Elementive, for joining us in part two of this interview, which we'll publish tomorrow, Matthew and I are going to discuss measuring how speed impacts SEO and ux. If you can't wait until our next episode and would like to learn more about Matthew, you can find a link to his LinkedIn profile in our show Notes or visit his company website, matthewedgar.net you can also find a link to his book Speed Metric Guide in our show Notes.
- [23:12]
Podcast Announcer
Okay, thanks to Jordan Cooney, the founder of Pre Visible. If you'd like to get in touch with Jordan, you can find a link to his LinkedIn profile in our show notes. You can contact him on Twitter. His handle is J.T. cooney. That's JTK O E N E. Or you can visit his company's website, which is Previsible IO that's P R E V I S I B L E I O. And a special thanks to Ahrefs for sponsoring this podcast. Monitoring your website used to require multiple expensive tools, but that's not the case anymore. Thanks to Ahrefs because they just launched their Ahrefs Webmaster Tools product, which monitors your SEO health, helps you keep track of your backlinks, and gives you the insight into what keywords are performing for free. So check out Ahrefs webmaster tools@ahrefs.com AWT that's Ahrefs A H R E F S. Just one more link in our show notes I'd like to tell you about. If you didn't have a chance to take notes while you were listening to this podcast, head over to voicesofsearch.com, where we have summaries of all of our episodes and contact information for our guests. You can also subscribe to our weekly newsletter, and you can even send us your topic suggestions or your marketing questions, which we'll answer live on our show. Of course, you can always reach out on social media. Our handle is voicesofsearch on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, or you can contact me directly. My handle is Ben Jschab B E N J S H A B and if you have if you haven't subscribed yet and you want a daily stream of SEO and content marketing insights in your podcast feed, we're going to publish an episode every day during the work week. So hit that subscribe button in your podcast app and we'll be back in your feed tomorrow morning. All right, that's it for today. But until next time, remember, the answers are always in the data.