There is a range of tools that measure website performance against the Core Web Vitals, including a corresponding notification in the Search Console. Pagespeed Insights, Lighthouse, and the Chrome UX Report are other tools that can provide further insight. Google also intends to update the Core Web Vitals annually, so that it can also include other relevant metrics in the future.
The topic of user experience on websites is becoming increasingly important, so it is essential for website operators to consider how they can ensure the best possible user experience.
SEO trend #3: Expertise beats keywords – why content quality and search intent are becoming increasingly important
The requirements for content quality are also sure to become more stringent in 2021. The main aim of Google’s recent core updates was to further improve the quality of search results, thereby ensuring that not only the best optimized websites in terms of keywords, for example, are ranked, but also the ones that give users appropriate, reliable, and trustworthy results. One concept used here is E-A-T. E-A-T stands for “Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness” and represents a set of criteria from the Google Quality Rater Guidelines. These are issued to employees – known as Google Quality Raters – to enable them to evaluate the quality of a website.
In addition to ranking factors, the criteria are used to compare results from the algorithm with assessments made by humans, in order to keep improving the algorithm in the long term. The Quality Rater Guidelines therefore give an insight into where the search is heading and what the algorithm might be capable of in the future.
Based on the intention of the person entering a search query, the aim is to produce and display an appropriate result, and that is precisely what Google is working on: ongoing refinement of the results to match the individual search intentions.
The latest example is referred to as “passage ranking”. Previously, Google’s rankings always used full pages from a website that were thematically classified and assessed. A page would only be displayed for a corresponding search query if it was appropriately relevant overall to a certain topic.
In the future, Google’s passage ranking will not only rate the page as a whole, but also consider and classify the content of individual text sections of a page in their own right. That means that a website can also rank with a text section for very specific search queries, even if that website doesn’t perform at its best overall.
Of course, the page itself will still be fully indexed; all that will change is the level of detail for the content to be ranked. This will all be based on more sophisticated AI that now has an even better understanding of what exactly users are looking for, and where and how individual text sections can provide the best responses to search queries. Since this is more about the actual search intent and less about hitting exact keywords, covering topics fully and providing content that fulfills the user’s search intent is becoming more of a priority.
Substantiating facts – for example by citing (reliable) sources or naming authors as experts – is also becoming increasingly important. First and foremost, this involves being able to produce reliable experts as testimonials for website content, especially when it comes to sensitive topics like health and finances. References from other high-quality websites in the form of backlinks also emphasize the original website’s expertise in a particular area. See the Google Quality Rater Guidelines for all other details on assessment criteria relating to E-A-T.
The bottom line
SEO trends may come and go, but the requirements for online retailers and website owners to become more user-centric remain vital. Content must be verified and fulfill the search intentions of users. Good content alone will not be enough if websites do not perform on a high-quality level and do not offer a positive user experience. This means that UX must become a higher priority for SEO.
This may not be anything groundbreaking that will eclipse everything we already know; good user experience will still tend to get pushed down the list and purchasing decisions are rarely rational. In actuality, what people really want is to “feel good”, and that should be reason enough to keep optimizing your own website, to give users the best possible experience from start to finish.
