If the news coming from Google’s headquarters is to be true then by May the company is planning to change the look of how the search results appear through the upcoming Google Page Experience update. It’s a much-awaited update that Google has confirmed users about after a year of initial announcement and now they have given six more months to wait for it as well. However, the good thing is that this update will take the user experience to the next level and there will also be notable improvements for ranking in search results such as Google will start highlighting pages in search results that are built on great page experience to direct users to the best sources for relevant information or online stores as well.

First Up, Let’s Understand Page Experience

In order to check out to the experience of a specific web page, Google performs an evaluation with the help of signals. These signals primarily are based on the loading speed of the page, the factor of mobile-friendliness, dealing with any safe browsing penalty, whether it runs on HTTPS, has intrusive interstitials, or if the content on the site jumps around upon the loading of a page or not. Read Also: WHICH ARE THE 5 BEST PRACTICES OF REVIEWING SOCIAL MEDIA CONTENT? Now with the Google Page Experience update coming in May, Google is going to refine all the search ranking factors and build metrics around speed and usability. So, the entire process of refinement is what Google calls it to be Core Web Vitals.

What Visual Indicators Will Support Search results?

Once Google makes the Page Experience update go live, the makers are going to test a number of ways for displaying the “visual indicator” in the search results - all with the aim to offer the searcher a specific search result which would be based on a great experience. Lately, Google has already been showing examples of such visual indicators in the form of AMP icons, slow labels, mobile-friendly labels, and much more. Google believes that providing information regarding the quality of a web page’s experience is as important as showing them the right specific details they are looking for with the search result. Hence, when the update will come into place, users would be able to have one snippet or image preview of the entire web page for them to know what kind of information they can expect on the site. Unfortunately, when Google was asked for a sample, they declined the offer to show anything. Moreover, Google hasn’t also commented on the duration of the user experience indicators on display. One can expect that it will be based on the data. Nevertheless, Google is going to test these labels and icons soon and if all goes well then it will launch them with the update in May 2021.

What Kind of Preparations Do You Need To Do?

If you are a company providing SEO services to clients or you want to do the prep work for your organization, it would be better to get ready for the user experience by becoming the ranking factor now. You can take help from the Core Web Vitals report in Google Search Console which will give you a detailed overview of how your site is currently performing in the required areas. Another good thing is that you won’t need AMP anymore if you want your articles to appear in the Top Stories carousel in search results once the update is implemented in May 2021. But with that being said, Google will still support AMP as the company already calls it as one of the easiest and cost-effective ways for publishers who want to keep their page experience great at all times. The only difference with the update would be that if you are going to publish your content in the AMP version, Google Search will automatically link it to the cache-optimized AMP version for optimal delivery to the end-user - pretty much like the way how everything currently works. No one is sure about the impact of the update on rankings as of yet. But many SEO experts think that it won’t be a massive one as Google’s Search algorithms already take care of the majority of Page Experience signals. SEO experts will only have to pay more attention to the visual indicators and other experience signals, which they can also currently do through Core Web Vitals for the upcoming Google Page Experience.