How to improve your SEO ranking

Site performance and Core Web Vitals (CWV) play a crucial role in user experience, directly impacting conversion rates, SEO rankings, and overall Net Promoter Scores (NPS). Google and other search engines use CWV metrics to evaluate your website's user experience.

Common use cases for analysing SEO performance.

Optimize Google ranking

By using the Speed Analysis Lab, you can easily understand Your Site’s Core Web Vitals (LCP, CLS, FID, INP) and how these vitals impact your site's KPIs and user experience.

Set up

1. Select Speed Analysis Lab from the Analyze section in the main menu.

2. To measure CWV impact, navigate to the 'Analyze' tab in the left-hand side menu. Start by selecting the specific page and device you wish to analyze. This will enable you to gather performance data for that page on the chosen device.

3. After the report has been generated, scroll down to the 'Tips and Best Practices' section. Here, filter the data by the area of improvement, such as SEO. This will provide suggestions for SEO-related improvements.

Example of a list of recommendations for improving SEO performance

4. Set up performance monitors to track key pages on your website. This allows you to monitor the impact of any changes made to improve CWV.

Learn more about tracking key technical KPIs 

5. Create alerts to receive notifications when the monitored page fails to achieve its objectives.

Optimize Google crawling through consistent monitoring

Use RUM metrics to establish the connection between Time to First Byte (TTFB) and your business's KPIs). Crawl Budget, denoting the number of pages that Googlebot explores and indexes within a specific timeframe, can be positively influenced by a faster site, as it signifies a healthy server.

Establishing a dedicated dashboard for ongoing monitoring of crucial web-performance KPIs throughout your site can serve as a valuable resource for maintaining a consistent and user-friendly website. This proactive approach enables the identification and resolution of issues that impact both user satisfaction and search engine rankings.

Set up

1. Start by creating your Dashboards by going to Dashboards module. Click on ‘+ New Dashboards’ and select 'Fully customisable'.

2. In the Dashboards parameters, choose “Intersect”.

3. Start setting up the web vitals widgets by using a ‘Page group view’ widget to set up a widget group for each Web Vital. Dedicate each widget group to a Web Vital.

4. Use the “Page group preview” widget. You can upload an image instead of choosing a page group.

Note: We recommend the order of Web Vitals group widgets to be: TTFB, LCP, CLS, FID, INP.

5. Add a single value widget. Choose the metric in the list, all devices, all users. We usually recommend to monitor the 75th percentile.

6. Add a “Line chart” widget with the 75th percentile for the same metric, all pages, all devices.

7. To add a new Web Vital, simply duplicate the group. You will then be able to modify the widgets to point to another metric.

8. Analyze the following metrics, focusing primarily on the 75th percentile:

• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)
• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)
• First Input Delay (FID)

Example of a dashboard configured for monitoring the performance core web vitals on Mobile vs Desktop

Single value widget tracking LCP performance (75th percentile), Line chart on LCP performance (75th percentile) over time, Single value widget tracking CLS performance (75th percentile), Line chart on CLS performance (75th percentile) over time.

9. Optional. See the journeys of users affected by poor web vitals on a specific page and compare with users who have experienced good timings to analyze the behavioral differences.

• Identify the patterns causing slower sessions
• Analyze differences of behaviors related to slowdowns (eg: bounce rate, etc)

Example of Journey analysis comparison between the Journeys of users experiencing a slow loading times on the Homepage

Optimize your images

Optimizing your site's image performance is vital for achieving faster page load times, enhancing the user experience, and boosting search engine rankings. And with Speed Analysis, you can quickly identify problematic images and understand why they load slowly, ultimately helping you to improve your resource prioritization.

Set up

1. Select Speed Analysis Lab from the Analyze section in the main menu.

2. To measure CWV impact, got o the 'Analyze'  tab in the left-hand side menu and start by selecting the specific page and device you want to analyze (e.g., a Product page with multiple product images). This will allow you to gather performance data for that page on the chosen device.

3. Navigate to the Waterfall Analysis. The waterfall analysis tool helps you identify problematic assets on your page. Pay close attention to:

• Number of requests and long tasks. Isolate individual elements within the waterfall that could be causing performance issues.

4. Once you've identified a problematic element, hover over the request representation to obtain detailed values on the request and response time milestones.

Tip! To see more information on a given request/response, click on the element and a side panel with more information about the resource will be displayed

Example of a Waterfall Analysis for image performance on the Homepage

Looking at Waterfall, an image with a longer request time was identifies. Examining the request and response time milestones, the duration from the start to the completion of receiving the response was 1.49 seconds.

Learn more about using the Waterfall

Having a dedicated Dashboards can help you understand what experience users are having when landing on your website though a particular traffic source and its correlation with key performance KPIs.

Set up

1. Start by creating your Dashboards by going to Dashboards module. Click on ‘+ New Dashboards’ and select 'Fully customisable'.

2. Open the dashboard settings, click 'Intersect' and click 'Apply'.

3. Start setting up the web vitals widgets by using a ‘Page group view’ widget to set up a widget group for each Web Vital.

4. Once you have created the group, you can then add the relevant widgets by using single value or line chart widgets of the Web Vitals you want to track.

5 Create different acquisition source segments (e.g., SEO, Email) to monitor landing page performance and compare them based on:

• Number of visits
• Bounce rate
• Exit rate
• Conversion rate
• Attraction rate

Find additional details on how to set up acquisition source segments here

Example of a dashboard configured for landing page web-performance

Site-wide single-value widgets displaying the percentage of visits for segments with varying levels of LCP on the entry page ('Good', 'Needs improvement', 'Poor', 'All visitors'), site-wide single-value widgets showing the bounce rate for segments with different levels of LCP on entry page ('Good', 'Needs improvement', 'Poor'), line charts comparing the percentage of sessions and bounce rate trends over time for the same LCP segments on the entry page ('Good', 'Needs improvement', 'Poor')

Learn more about web vitals monitoring with Dashboards

Go Further

Explore the following CS University courses to gain a deeper understanding of Speed Analysis Lab or Speed Analysis Real User Monitoring (RUM).