30-second summary:
- The Mobile Experience is critical for all categories when looking at Core Web Vitals (CWV)
- Image compression seems to be a leading challenge for leading brands
- Pages doing well for CWV tend to be informational in nature
- Retail, in particular, could see significant disruption if second-tier retailers receive a boost
- Across all sectors, there is opportunity and time for improvement and preparation as long as issues are addressed as a business priority
- Enterprise Search and Digital Marketers need to prescribe the right course of action to meet core vital benchmarks
- They must also convince the rest of the organization that the efforts will be worth the results
The long-awaited implementation of mobile-first indexing is now upon us, meaning that content visible only on desktop will be ignored from this point on by the world’s largest search engine. Mobile-first has been a priority of Google’s for years as the beat of the user experience drum has grown to a crescendo.
A few short months from now, the Page Experience update as a whole will roll out, too. Page experience “measures aspects of how users perceive the experience of interacting with a web page,” according to Google[1] and consists of five major Search signals.
Hopefully you’re familiar with at least four of these, as they’ve been in play for some time. Mobile-friendliness, safe-browsing, HTTPS-security, and intrusive interstitial guidelines have each been rolled out and updated as Google has sought to keep pace with evolving consumer expectations.
So what’s new?
In May, signals from a new metric called Core Web Vitals (CWV) will combine with these existing four signals for one mega-metric called Page Experience[2]. BrightEdge (my company) conducted a study into CWVs preparedness and mobile-first compliance to determine the potential