How Google’s Update Impacts Your Lead Generation Strategy

Google has been the most dominant search biggie since quite some time now.

And, that is why throughout the globe, (excluding a few countries like China) Google is the primary go-to resource for any kind of information.

Over the years, Google has served all these search queries pretty well. Yes, they have helped numerous people discover several things and gather important information.

This is why, it has turned itself into a great source for businesses and brands who have been looking up to it and utilising it as their way of driving sales as well as enhancing brand awareness.

Now, if you are in such kind of a business, then you most likely know that how important it is to attract the eyeballs of your clients, and drive their customer journey in order to generate leads and make success conversions.

Today, numerous B2B businesses are dependant on Google for generating qualified leads for their business. And, that mostly happens for businesses who deal in B2B.

So, now as Google has already released their update, it is high time, B2B businesses pay some more attention to understand this update well enough as this major update is quite responsible for influencing Google Search and might end up being responsible for disrupting your entire SEO strategy.

But if you are wondering about what makes this update so impactful that B2B businesses should be so aware of this, then let us tell you that this algorithm update from Google can hit you quite hard if your website fails to perform well enough.

However, businesses who have not quite updated their websites and are into the B2B segment, would be facing a very hard time which might come as a drastic downfall in their search traffic as well as brand visibility.

And, this devastating change can crumple their entire sales pipeline. This is nothing short of bad news.

However, this update from Google also comes with some great benefits that you would might experience if you understand this update from the core and make necessary changes. This action will help your website rise in the ranks in relevant searches, bringing you waves of hot deals!

So, let’s dig deeper into this update and find out how you can make the most of our Google’s “Page Experience”.

What Is Google’s Page Experience?

A lot of people out there would be confusing page experience with page speed, however, in reality, page speed is just a component of page experience and these are not same.

In fact, far from page speed, Page Experience is a set of ranking signals which are responsible for informing Google about if a page is delivering a great experience to their website visitors.

There are several factors to this. These are, page speed, security, performance, and usability.

And, besides all these components, there is one major component (or you should consider as a set of components) known as Core Web Vitals.

These factors are evaluated especially for the mobile version of a web page. Yes, Google closely notices how well your website is delivering experience on mobile devices, how secure the website is, how well a website adheres to the best practices regarding web development, and lastly, how user-friendly a website is.

Let’s dig deeper into these components.

• Core Web Vitals – Core Web Vitals refer to the metrics that you need to upgrade in your website in order to meet the benchmarks set by Google. The components of Core Web Vitals are, Loading, Interactivity, along with Visual Stability.
• Mobile-friendliness – This component is measured by how much time your website takes time to load, and how good of an experience a user gets when they visit your website’s mobile version.
• Secure Browsing – Secure browsing refers to the assurance to users about the security of data and they are not at all exposed to any malware or any such deceptive programs.
• SSL Certification – The website is secure, and users can cross-check the same just by checking whether the URL starts with HTTPS (has SSL certificate) instead of HTTP.
• Intrusive Elements – There are no such elements in the website, such as poorly designed pop-ups, or advertisements that will hinder the overall experience of your website visitor.

Why Is Page Experience So Important to Google?

After going through the above, you might be wondering why is page experience so important to Google.

To clarify this, you need to understand that Google has several factors that assess the aspects of your website in order to make sure that their users are getting the best experience from their search results.

And, as your website is a part of the results Google comes up with for its searches, Google wants to make sure that searchers do not get disappointed when they visit your website, after they find it in the search results.

To be sure of the same, Google has spent years to come up with an algorithm that can make sure that a website or a web page is a good fit in the search results and contains the best as well as the highest quality results.

Now, these results are not just limited to how good your content is, but it depends on how your entire website performs, or in other words how good of an experience your website or webpage delivers.

And, here comes Page Experience.

Using this page experience algorithm and its components as benchmarks, Google filters out websites that take too long to load and has poor UX and shows the pages that have excelled in what Google seeks through Page Experience.

This is quite imperative in order to save searchers from visiting a website that dos not qualify and end up encountering a poor experience, increasing their credibility in the eyes of searchers, worldwide.

History of Google’s Algorithms

Updates to Google’s core search algorithm are not rare—the search giant releases them on a regular basis, often several times per year. When announcing these updates, Google has always pointed back to their earlier statements explaining their need to refine Google’s search results. External Link. Opens in new window. so that only the websites with the best and most relevant content for a searcher’s query are showing up in its search engine results pages (SERPs).

Still, not all Google updates are created equal. Over the past decade, the more impactful updates of the Google Search algorithm have been designed to reflect major changes in digital best practices and the ever-evolving needs and expectations of internet users:

• The “Panda” update in 2011 sought to remove low-quality or “thin” content from search results.
• The “Penguin” update in 2012 aimed to refine search results by removing websites using black hat link-building techniques.
• The “Hummingbird” update in 2013 introduced natural-language processing to help Google determine search intent more accurately, and fundamentally changed its approach to matching results with queries–including laying the foundation for voice search.
• The “Pigeon” update in 2014 aimed to refine and elevate local search results so that small local businesses with good content and organic presence can match with queries and rank just as highly as bigger brands located in the searcher’s proximity.
• The “BERT” update in 2018 took Google’s natural language processing to a new level, implementing a neural network-based technique to make the algorithm even better at accurately interpreting the meaning and intent of search queries based on contextual data.

The Implications for Lead Generation & SEO

Not every company has the same dependence on their website’s organic search performance when it comes to generating new sales. Still, every business has a stake in building and managing its brand visibility and presence in Google SERPs–especially with a vast and growing number of competing brands and websites seeking to outrank them on the coveted first page for popular keywords.

There are major risks to a company delaying or ignoring the need to update their website for a better page experience that meets Google’s performance benchmarks:

1. Losing Search Visibility to the Competition

For businesses, the goal in search is to rank for industry keywords and terms that indicate a high likelihood of buyer intent. The problem is, there are a finite number of keywords related to a product or service, especially if it is a newer or niche category, and all of your competitors are pursuing those same keywords.

What makes organic SEO even more competitive is the reality that ranking on the first page of Google search results is the only goal that really matters for driving organic search traffic to your site, since only 25% of searchers click through to the second page—yet there are no more than 10 possible organic listings to win on Page One of any Google SERP.

To put this in perspective, think of the dozens or perhaps even hundreds of brands in a particular industry sector, then imagine all of them in one large room playing a competitive game of musical chairs—but with only 10 possible seats to win.

Whenever Google updates its algorithm, the music stops, and every website frantically scrambles to sit in one of the 10 chairs. Many of the 10 winners who managed to grab a seat will still look with envy at the 3 best chairs (i.e., the top 3 ranked positions in search results) and strategize how to win those seats in the next round.

For top-ranked websites that have not focused on maximizing their site’s performance, Google’s Page Experience update will likely push them down and out of these valuable first page search rankings, leaving them without a seat when the music stops—which leads to less organic traffic and fewer opportunities to generate leads.

Also Read: Keyword Research: Understand What Your Audience Wants

2. Losing Traffic to Topic-Adjacent Web Content

When websites implement SEO to rank higher for specific keywords in Google Search, it’s not just their competitors who are jostling for those prized first-page SERP rankings. They’re also competing with any web content that is topically related to the product or service they offer, including reviews, news stories, social media posts, and even Google’s paid search ads targeting the same keywords.

The presence of this competing content on a SERP means it will be more difficult for sites to rank highly enough to stand out so that it can earn more click-throughs and meaningful search impressions for the brand.

Optimizing site performance to offer the best Page Experience gives you a better chance at outranking the topic-adjacent content that further obscures your brand presence in Google search results.

3. The Penalty for Complacency is Irrelevance

This is not the first Google update, and it certainly won’t be the last. Google already views aging and outdated content less favourably than newer, more relevant content. For website owners that don’t regularly publish new content, or refresh their old content, the need to optimize website performance has only become greater.

With each passing day, digital marketers are publishing fresh, high-quality content that is developed with the ultimate goal of outranking competitor websites that have become complacent with their high Google search rankings and neglected the best practice of continually optimizing pages and performance.

Your Website Isn’t Performing as Well as You Think

You might open your site on your mobile or desktop browser and feel pretty safe and confident that your website performs well, but the reality is you don’t know how it’s performing “under the hood” unless you’ve objectively measured how it performs using the right tools.

Much like you can’t tell whether a car engine will start by just by looking at it, you need to perform a diagnostic that provides more data about what’s actually happening when your website loads on a browser. Luckily, you can diagnose your website’s performance fairly easily using Google’s free Lighthouse tool.

Measuring Site Performance with Lighthouse

Measuring how well your website performs is especially easy when using a Chrome browser on desktop. Here’s a brief how-to:

1. In the Chrome browser, hover over the page and perform a secondary click to pull up the menu and select “Inspect”
2. When the panel appears to the right, click the Lighthouse tab–if you don’t see Lighthouse, click the arrows to reveal the dropdown and it should be there
3. In the Lighthouse panel, make sure you check all the boxes to score all performance areas of your website against Google’s criteria, then click “Generate Report”
4. Your scores will indicate how well your site tested against Google performance requirements. If everything is green, you’re in good shape. And if everything is 100, you get fireworks! If you get yellow or red scores, you need to rethink whether your site is optimized enough to truly perform up to Google’s standards.

Also Read: Amazing SEO Report Change the Game

Prioritizing Speed, Accessibility, and Security

As most of you will probably discover once you run the tests, your website may excel in some areas, but it’s likely struggling to meet the entirety of Google’s criteria for optimal performance. The scores presented in the Lighthouse tool comprise a number of best practices that include:

• Speed and Usability – Websites are expected to load quickly on all devices and avoid frustrating visitors with interruptions and glitchy browsing experiences; this is especially emphasized for the site’s mobile experience, which is the Google default for search indexing.
• Web Accessibility – Google expects sites to conform with accessibility best practices established under the WC3’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0, which are the currently-adopted standards for website accessibility across the world.
• Safety and Security – Sites must live on a secure server and avoid exposing visitors to unnecessary risks due to poor coding practices or a lack of proper maintenance.
• Search Optimization – Google provides well-established criteria that web developers and content publishers can follow to optimize their web pages and content for the search engine.

Don’t take a lack of good scores too personally–meeting all of these criteria requires a breadth and depth of digital expertise that few businesses have. Unfortunately, few digital agencies possess the right mix of resources and knowledge to develop sites that meet all of these requirements.

How to Avoid Page Experience Penalties

Now that you know more about Page Experience and Google’s thinking behind search algorithm updates, you might be left with the question “What can my website do to avoid losing search rankings after the Page Experience update?”

Implement Website Accessibility

Making your website accessible enough to meet Google’s criteria for web accessibility is both good for business and an ethical obligation for brands that support fairness and equality on the internet.

Accessible web design and development is not easy to do–as we discussed above, even most digital agencies aren’t equipped for it–but the long-term ROI, the positive branding, and the immediate SEO benefits of implementing accessibility make it a no-brainer for companies that want to maximize their site’s search performance.

Optimize Content Across Digital Channels

It may sound like a given, but striving to produce the highest quality content is really the best SEO strategy because it supports Google’s primary goal: Always present the highest quality content in a user’s search results, even if it doesn’t have the best page experience ranking signals. This also applies to constantly updating previously posted web content with new or more helpful information that increases its relevance and value to the reader.

The Page Experience update is focused on your website’s technical performance, but the content posted to every digital marketing channel works together holistically to improve SEO and nurture prospective customers into becoming sales leads. Your marketing campaign running on social media or through email nurturing will eventually draw the audience to the website, where the great content there can drive them further down the sales funnel towards conversion.

Use Tools to Monitor and Detect SEO Issues

A key to improving your page rank in Google Search is to always be aware of how your content is performing and evaluate whether your content is progressively becoming more search optimized.

There are several free tools you can use to ensure your site conforms with Google’s Page Experience guidelines and follows best practices for search engine optimization:

• Lighthouse – As demonstrated above, Lighthouse is a useful tool for measuring page performance in real time against Google’s expectations.
• Google Search Console – Search Console is an essential tool for ensuring your website can be easily and accurately crawled and indexed by Google’s search engine. Google has also just added a helpful Page Experience tab that reports on page experience scores for all your website pages.
• PageSpeed Insights – Put any website URL into this tool and you will receive both a real-time performance measurement and Google’s own historical data (if available) showing how the site has performed in terms of Core Web Vitals and other benchmarks over the previous 30 days.

Bottomline

So, after going through our entire guide we hope you have a clear idea about why Page Experience is so important to Google and how it can impact your lead generation.

Make sure you comply to every aspect that we have touched in our article, and you will definitely find your website in the high ranks of relevant Google searches.