What will happen?
In May of 2021, Google plans to release a core update to their algorithm. The update referred to as the Page Experience update, will be the first update to roll out since December 2020 .This update will not be specific to any region, website sector, or language. Google is constantly making tweaks to their algorithm, but the broader updates such as this one usually happen every 3-5 months.
What does this update mean?
It is being reported that this update will be larger than most and many websites will begin seeing massive ranking fluctuations in the weeks following the changes. However, the idea behind this algorithm update should sound nothing new to webmasters. Google launched a similar core update in May of 2020.
Rankings may fluctuate depending on mobile-friendliness, safe-browsing, intrusive interstitial policies and HTTPS. Webmasters may also check Google’s Web Vitals for unified guidance on ensuring that page loading speed, cumulative layout shift, and visual components are up to par with competing websites.
Individuals and website owners should review their sector’s volatility and prioritize making updates before the update in May. A great tool to use the SEMrush sensor. This tool rates the volatility from 1 to 10 where 1 represents a very low volatility. Websites with content relating to Science, Real Estate, and Finance tend to have low to medium volatility while content relating to Entertainment, Sports, and News generally have a higher volatility. Websites with higher volatility can see significant changes in rankings after the core update and webmasters should prioritize making relevant changes. Changes may include optimizing for mobile, improving page speeds, compressing large image file sizes and adding alt text to images.
The Google Page Speed Insights was designed to help a website’s performance optimizations. Anyone may use these tools to analyze a website and find opportunities to help a page load faster and boost performance.
What impact will this update have on your business?
Keep in mind that a decrease in a site’s organic visibility doesn’t mean a site has been penalized. It simply means that other sites have been rewarded or Google felt they were more relevant for a specific query within the updated algorithm. Google’s suggestion is always to continue focusing on providing quality content, in turn adding to a user’s page experience.
Conclusion
We recommend monitoring organic traffic in their respective analytics suite and to monitor search impressions within Google Search Console. This will help gauge the type of impact that Google’s new update is having on the site from an organic perspective post-update.
