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When it comes to SEO for law firms or any other type of business, there is on-page SEO, and there is off-page SEO.
On-page SEO is the factors and strategies that are focused on optimizing your website in ways that are in your control. Then, those strategies focused on optimizing your site and brand in other places are off-page SEO.
Your on-page SEO is about creating a website that users will find appealing and that, as a result, search engines will too. Off-page SEO is more about exposure for your site while also building a sense of authority and trust.
A subcategory of on-page SEO is technical SEO. Technical SEO relies on improving the technical aspects of your website so that you can improve your rankings. When your website is easier to crawl, faster and easier for search engines to understand, then it’s technically well-optimized.
The goal of Google and other search engines is to provide users with the best results for any query they have. That means that the robots on Google will crawl and then evaluate pages on different factors. Some of these factors are driven by user experience, like page loading speed. Other factors can help a search engine robot better understand what your pages are about, and you can use structured data.
Essentially a good technical setup helps search engines know what your site is about so that it’s not sending traffic to places that aren’t high-quality.
Core web vitals enters the conversation when talking about on-page and technical SEO.
1. What They Are
Core Web Vitals are specific factors considered important by Google for the user experience of a page. There are three specific measurements that are included in Core Web Vitals, which are measures of the specific page speed and measurements of user interaction.
Google has said it is making page experience an official ranking factor, which signifies the importance of Core Web Vitals.
The company specifically said they were introducing a new signal that combines Core Web Vitals with existing signals for page experience.
Other factors that are relevant for the user experience from a ranking perspective include HTTPS, a lack of interstitial popups, mobile-friendliness, and safe browsing, meaning you don’t have malware on your page.
While page experience is one of the ranking factors Google uses, there are hundreds of others, so it can’t make up for poor quality content, but it is important.
Read next: How to create and publish web stories
2. Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)
One Core Web Vital is Largest Contentful Paint or LCP. This is how long, from a user’s perspective, it takes a page to load. It’s the time from when someone clicks a link to when they’re seeing the bulk of the content on their screen.
LCP has differences from other measures of page speed. Other metrics don’t look at what it’s like for users to open a page. LCP focuses primarily on what’s going to matter most with page speed, which is people being able to see and then interact with your page.
You can look at Google Search Console data and see the LCP data for your whole site rather than looking at each page individually. The goal is for every page on your site to reach LCP in 2.5 seconds, although this is a challenge, especially for large pages and pages with many features.
Other things you can do to improve your LCP include removing unnecessary third-party scripts, upgrading your web host, and setting up what’s called lazy loading. Lazy loading makes it, so images load only if someone scrolls down your page. You can also remove big page elements.
3. First Input Delay
The next part of Core Web Vitals is First Input Delay or FID. FID measures the time it takes for someone to actually interact with your page. That might be something like clicking a link in your navigation or choosing a menu option.
Again this is relevant to Google because it looks at how real users will interact with your site.
If your site is just content, you may not have FID because you might not have login pages or pages where someone needs to input something immediately. If you do have a page where a user needs to click something quickly, FID is very important.
4. Cumulative Layout Shift
Cumulative layout shift or CLS looks at the stability of your page as it’s loading, which is also aptly named visual stability. If the elements of your page are moving around a lot when they’re loading, your CLS is high, and this is a negative from a Core Web Vitals perspective.
You want the elements on your page to be pretty stable when they load so that a user doesn’t have to re-figure where images, fields, and links are located once a page is loaded. You also don’t want people to click on things by mistake.
To improve here, you can make sure that ads have a reserved space and use set size attribute dimensions for things like media, including videos and images. This will allow the browser user to know exactly how much space the element will take up.
If you’re going to add new UI elements to a page, put them below the fold.
5. Metrics Are Split
When you’re looking at core web vitals, the metrics are separated between mobile and desktop. The mobile signals are used for mobile rankings, and the same is true of desktop signals.
Finally, the metrics for Core Web Vitals are likely to change over time, as can the thresholds for what’s acceptable from the perspective of Google. Core Web Vitals have already changed, and there are proposed changes coming down the pipe. Google continues to show that its biggest priority in ranking pages is the user experience, including things measured by Core Web Vitals, in addition to unique, informative, and valuable content.