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Our site is dealing with a dynamic where our Core Web Vitals are already green, and thus our priority-setting folks don't see it as a priority to improve the sc

Our site is dealing with a dynamic where our Core Web Vitals are already green, and thus our priority-setting folks don't see it as a priority to improve the score any further. I want to be able to tell them "Hey, Green at 600ms will still give us an SEO boost over Green at 800ms, so we should do this," but I am having a hard time establishing whether that is actually true. Does anyone know for sure?

pancomplex 3y ago
During the experiment we used Google's PageInsight which will give you a literal "Speed Index". Without RSC Google gave us a Speedindex of only 1.6 vs 0.6 with RSC, which seems to factor directly into the PageRank algorithm: https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2018/01/using-page-speed-in-mobile-search https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2018/01/using-page...
iterminate 3y ago
There's a temptation to get caught up on quantifiable scores when working on SEO because so much of it can't be quantified, everyone is mostly guessing what Google wants... however, scores are ultimately meaningless and you should be measuring the impact on your business metrics. For example, if your website is designed to generate sales, did reducing your CWV to 800ms improve revenue? SEO is a means to an end, you can spend thousands of human hours to rank #1 for a keyword but if it doesn't improve a metric that matters (e.g: your revenue) it's a complete waste of time. More broadly, prioritisation isn't about whether a piece of work will achieve its aim, it's about understanding which options are the best use of limited resources. For example, you may be able to say confidently that reducing CWV from 800ms to 600ms will increase your traffic from Google search by 5% but that's immaterial until it's compared against other options -- there's an opportunity cost associated with all work. Personally, I would be surprised if reducing CWV from 800ms to 600ms is the best use of your resources, unless your business is one of the few that has a strong organic search strategy with organic search accounting for a meaningful volume of revenue -- nowadays, most companies find paid ads are much more effective.
- josephg 3y ago
  If you want to know if those 200ms matter, try adding 200ms of artificial latency on every page load for a week and see what it does to conversions. As a first approximation, the difference between 600ms and 800ms will probably be similar to the difference between 800ms and 1000ms. You should be able to get a rough figure of what that difference is with 1 line of change to your code.

pancomplex 3y ago

During the experiment we used Google's PageInsight which will give you a literal "Speed Index". Without RSC Google gave us a Speedindex of only 1.6 vs 0.6 with RSC, which seems to factor directly into the PageRank algorithm: https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2018/01/using-page-speed-in-mobile-search https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2018/01/using-page...

iterminate 3y ago

There's a temptation to get caught up on quantifiable scores when working on SEO because so much of it can't be quantified, everyone is mostly guessing what Google wants... however, scores are ultimately meaningless and you should be measuring the impact on your business metrics. For example, if your website is designed to generate sales, did reducing your CWV to 800ms improve revenue? SEO is a means to an end, you can spend thousands of human hours to rank #1 for a keyword but if it doesn't improve a metric that matters (e.g: your revenue) it's a complete waste of time. More broadly, prioritisation isn't about whether a piece of work will achieve its aim, it's about understanding which options are the best use of limited resources. For example, you may be able to say confidently that reducing CWV from 800ms to 600ms will increase your traffic from Google search by 5% but that's immaterial until it's compared against other options -- there's an opportunity cost associated with all work. Personally, I would be surprised if reducing CWV from 800ms to 600ms is the best use of your resources, unless your business is one of the few that has a strong organic search strategy with organic search accounting for a meaningful volume of revenue -- nowadays, most companies find paid ads are much more effective.

josephg 3y ago
If you want to know if those 200ms matter, try adding 200ms of artificial latency on every page load for a week and see what it does to conversions. As a first approximation, the difference between 600ms and 800ms will probably be similar to the difference between 800ms and 1000ms. You should be able to get a rough figure of what that difference is with 1 line of change to your code.