 Hi, everyone, and welcome to our session on Core Web Vitals and Search Engine Optimization SEO. Today, we'll be talking about what SEO is, how the Core Web Vitals play a role there, and how you can use Search Console to help track and improve your site's metrics. For many, SEO is a weird collection of black magic spells. But once you dig in a bit more, it's not at all that. You've heard that Google is pretty good at figuring websites out, and it's tempting to assume that having a clean website means you don't need to think about SEO. But it's not that simple. SEO is all about improving the quality and quantity of the traffic a website gets from normal search results, so excluding things like ads. There are multiple things a website can do to achieve that. It differs a bit by search engine, and I can only speak for Google. In general, the main aspects are the same everywhere, though. Make relevant content. Users go to search engines to find out more, and your pages might be the resource that they're looking for. This is more than just writing well. It's also about picking topics and phrasing that's used by your audience. Make the content accessible to search engines. If search engines can't understand your content, it'll be hard for them to recommend it. Show why your site is awesome using the various signals that flow into SEO. There's a lot that plays in here. A good way to think about this is, given there are multiple good and relevant results, how can you show search engines that yours is particularly good and useful answer for users right now? The core web vitals flow into that last group. For the other aspects of SEO, I strongly recommend checking out some of the SEO starter guides and getting help from experienced SEOs. It's useful to think of SEO a bit like usability. A little bit of information is helpful, but when it gets serious, you want to get the help from experts. Over to the core web vitals. You've heard a lot about the core web vitals today already, so this is really just a super short overview to help get you started. The core web vitals focus on three aspects. First, how quickly the page loads. Second, how soon you can interact with the page. And third, how stable the page is as it's loading and as the user is interacting with it. If you're curious about more details there, be sure to check out the other sessions and our documentation. When it comes to data sources, we differentiate between field data and lab test data. Field data, also called real user metrics or rum data, is collected from users over the course of about a month and is based on what they experience when viewing your site. This is a part of the Chrome user experience report in short crux. Lab tests, on the other hand, are generated on demand with testing tools in your browser or on a server using settings that try to approximate what users would see. For search rankings, we use field data as this is what your site's users have experienced over time. This makes the data more representative for your site, taking into account where your users are located and how they access your website. The core web vitals metrics are then combined with other signals for search. We call this combination the page experience ranking factor. The additional signals are mobile friendliness, safe browsing, HTTPS security and compliance with our intrusive interstitial guidelines. These have all been around for a while and there's much written up about them so I won't go into much detail here. We plan to adjust these signals over time to best reflect a good user experience for users. We'll give a six months heads up before any change. The data is split by mobile on desktop and applied appropriately for search ranking. When a mobile page is shown as a separate amp URL to users, that's what will be used then. In other words, if you're on a mobile page, the ranking is only affected by mobile data and the same for desktop. So in short, for search rankings, we use the page experience set of metrics. These include a few existing signals as well as the core web vitals. We track these based on what users would see separating mobile and desktop experiences. Cool, we looked at page experience, the core web vitals and how they're used in search. Let's take a look at Search Console now. Search Console is a free tool for site owners that gives insights into Google Search for your website. Once you've verified ownership and given the tool a bit of time to collect all the metrics, it's time to head over to the core web vitals report. In this report, you'll see graphs for mobile and desktop showing how a relevant sample of your site's pages score. This sample and the scoring is based on the Chrome user experience report data. That's the field data collected over time. Because of that, any changes that you make on your website will take about a month to be reflected here. Clicking through to one of these reports, you see a graph of the total number of URLs tracked and can see the individual issues flagged below. Going to one of these issues, you'll see a similar graph on top, together with a list of sample URLs for that issue type below. Keep in mind that these reports are based on the field data, so not all of your site's URLs will be available here. It's often useful to focus on the bigger buckets of issues across both the poor and needs improvement categories. We try to recognize patterns, such as shared templates, and group those URLs together as fixing the issue once can improve large parts of your website, which is pretty awesome. A good approach to improving these issues is to take a bigger issue type and to work to resolve it. After recognizing the issue, the first step is usually trying to reproduce the issue locally or within a testing tool. If that's not possible for bigger issues, it's worth narrowing things down using the various tools and scripts available elsewhere. Once you've reproduced the issue, you can work to improve the vitals. I won't go into details here, but be sure to check out the other sessions for more information. As an aside, sometimes you may notice that other Google products or services are slowing down your pages. Google Search doesn't give any special treatment to these, just like users generally won't care why your pages offer a bad user experience. Treat embeds from Google just like you would treat any other embedded resource. Once your live website is updated, you can tell Search Console that the issue is fixed. This is done in the appropriate drill down report that we saw before by clicking the Validate Fix button on top. Search Console will then start a review of the URL's flag and let you know how your improvements turned out over time. Let's get back to SEO. As mentioned in the beginning, there's more to SEO than just page experience. Some of the factors are listed here. When determining the rankings, we have to weigh these factors appropriately. In general, we prioritize pages with the best information overall, even if some aspects of page experience are subpar. A good page experience doesn't override having great relevant content. For example, if someone is searching for your company's name, it would be expected to show your company's website, even if it's slow or otherwise provides a subpar page experience. In cases where there are multiple pages that have similar content, page experience becomes much more important for visibility in Search. It's not the only factor. And of course, there's much more to a website than just Search. We found that when a site provides a good page experience, it generally performs well with users, too. For example, we found users are 24% less likely to abandon page loads overall. In particular, we saw 22% less abandonment for news sites and 24% less abandonment for shopping sites. There are few changes that can show this level of improvement for online businesses. And results like these are part of the reason we prioritize the web vitals metrics. The search ranking change is currently planned for the first half of 2021. With this change, we're also making all pages eligible to be featured in the Top Stories carousel of the search results using page experience as a guide. If you're curious about the details, be sure to check out our blog post. Well, that was it. Our short excursion into the world of core web vitals and SEO. In short, while there's more to page experience than just SEO and there's more to SEO than just page experience, SEO is also definitely a good reason to work on improving your site's page experience. I hope you found this session useful and insightful. Don't forget to check out the other sessions here to find out more ways to improve your website for users. Bye.