What are core web vitals that affect Ranking - Part 2

How to use Core Web Vitals for your SEO

While the initial reaction to a new Google ranking factor might be annoyance, trepidation or frustration, tracking your site’s Core Web Vitals can help your SEO efforts quite a bit.

If you’ve been working in the SEO world for almost any amount of time you’ve probably noticed that Google constantly "advises" to site owners to provide their users with a “great experience” but didn’t really expound on what that might mean.

Google Search Console Core Web Vitals

Google recently replaced the Speed Report in Google Search Console with the new Web Core Vitals report.

his provides an overview of how all of your web pages perform against the new metrics, categorizing them as either red, for ‘poor URLs’, orange, for ‘URLs need improvement’, and green, for ‘good URLs’.

This is segmented by device, showing both Mobile and Desktop results. Users can then click the ‘Open Report’ link to see a breakdown of each error type, with additional information and sample URLs.

Core Web Vitals vs. other ranking factors

While providing your users with a great page experience is important for SEO, it’s not the be-all, end-all when it comes to rankings. Google is still looking at other signals such as trust factors, content quality and relevance.

These factors related to overall information quality are still considered to be the primary elements that go into determining search rankings. Core Web Vitals will serve in more of a "tie-breaker" role when two pages have content of relatively equal relevance and quality.

This means a page with poorer Core Web Vital scores could still outrank those with better page experiences on the back of better, more relevant content.