by adminGoogle User Experience Update: What is Google’s New Update and How to Prepare for It
Did you know Google has come up with a new Experience update, which can affect your website? Your website holds an important position in the overall patient experience, especially, during the time of COVID-19. Your website acts as a one-stop for patients to get all the health information, make appointments, and get in touch with healthcare providers.
Google knows the importance of user experience and that’s why it has come with a new algorithm ranking factor. Simply put, Google is now taking account of how your patients or doctor perceive the experience of your website or web pages and accordingly, it will give you ranking on its search platform.
But, what is Google’s Page Experience Update?
For starters, the latest update from Google brings user experience to the forefront. It has introduced three new metrics that are known as Core Web Vitals, which help Google to measure how a user perceives the experience of a particular web page. So, what are these three new metrics? Google has added three new metrics including Loading, Interactivity, and Visual Stability. These new metrics will join the existing metrics including mobile-friendliness, HTTPS security, and intrusive interstitial guidelines.
How Will This Affect My Healthcare Website?
Before this, let us understand how Google’s algorithm works. Google consider hundreds of signals to produce Search results. So, with each update, it is trying to make it more user-friendly for both the businesses and the end-user. So, if you provide a good page experience on your website, Google will consider you on search results, while if your page experience is not up to the mark, it will not suggest your website to users. Now, this could be problematic for some businesses that have not made the changes to their websites accordingly. The three new metrics could be a bit difficult to understand. Let’s simply it first:
- Loading or Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): This is a measure through which Google knows how much time is taken for a user to see the largest content on the page. As per the company, LCP should be within 2.5 seconds from the first page load.
- First Input Delay (FID): This is a measure for interactivity. With this, Google gets to know the difference in time from when a user first interacts with the page to the time when the browser responds to the request. As per Google, a good FID should be less than 100 milliseconds.
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): This is a measure for visibility. Google will now be able to measure how much content is visible in the viewport. As per Google, a page should maintain a CLS of less than 0.1.
How to Prepare for Google’s latest Page Experience Update
Now, you know how important is to implement the metrics on your website so that you get benefited from the latest update. But how to do it? If you are still struggling with it, here are some vital steps that should take to prepare for Google’s latest update:
Improve your Core Web Vital scores
You must work on the three metrics that Google has introduced. Thankfully, the company has a new Core Web vital report in the Google Search Console that will help you to figure out your current score. With this, you can start optimizing your website so that it would be easier for Google to show you in the search results.
Create Mobile-Friendly Website
A website that is not mobile-friendly is not going to give you any benefit after the update. You must have a mobile-friendly website for your hospital and if you already have it, optimize keeping the above metrics in mind to better align with the latest update.
Make Sure to Switch to HTTPs
Google takes security very seriously. So, if your website is not on HTTPs, you may not get results from Google. Securing your website will not only help you to grow but will help you guard against threats like malware attacks, data breaches, and more.
Avoid Intrusive Interstitials at Any Cost
Pop-ups are good to update users about certain information you want to share, but they should not come at the cost of user experience. Sending too many pop-ups may hamper the whole user experience and will impact your ranking. Make sure you comply with Google’s policy of pop-ups and update your website accordingly.
If you are struggling with your website, its ranking and looking for assistance, Healthcare MarTech is always there to assist you in your Digital Transformation journey.