After Google announced that Core Web Vitals must be fully met in order to position a website, SEO experts need to know how to check these factors Solve any problem that can appear.
Core Web Vitals are markers with which the behavior of a website can be analyzed from the perspective of the user.
In 2020, Google announced that Core Web Vitals would become a very important ranking factor in 2021. The main goal of these metrics is to measure the loading times of a webpage, its level of interactivity and its visual stability. In short, it’s a set of metrics created for Improvement of the user experience (UX) on the websites.
With this in mind, it is important for SEO professionals to know how to check the performance of these metrics and convey it to their customers. To do this, some tools like Screaming Frog and the PageSpeed Insights API need to be in place and do the following:
-Conectar la API de PageSpeed Insights into a screaming frog: The first step is to connect the PageSpeed Insights API so that you can get information about how each page is performing in Screamign Frog. With this in mind, it should be enough to get one measurement, although it is only possible to get 25,000 readings per day. To connect the API you need to access the Screaming Frog configuration and look for the “API Access” option which is where the PageSpeed Insights are located. Just copy and paste the code into the “Secret Key” field.
When connected, metrics can be defined separately or analyzed all at once. With that in mind, it is best to use the All Metric Groups option for a full analysis.
-Analysis of the website: Next you should start analyzing the website. To do this, simply copy the domain of the website into the “Enter URL to the spider” field. There are two bars at the beginning of the process: “Crawler”, which shows the analysis process, and “API”, which shows the PageSpeed Insights analysis process.
– Review the results: when the analysis is complete, select the “PageSpeed” option in the Screaming Frog navigation bar and click “Export” to get an audit of the Core Web Vitals. In the document, look for the columns: “Largest content meal time”, “Total bloking time” and “Cumulative layout shift”. With that in mind, the results should be filtered like this:
-Cumulative layout shift: Find all of these sites with a CLS of 0.25 or greater.
– Greatest satisfactory meal time: Filter and find websites with an LCP greater than 4000 ms.
-Total blocking time: Finally, you need to filter and find the pages that mark a TBT of 300 ms or more.
The pages obtained through these filters are the ones that require improvement to meet Core Web Vitals.
-Create a report: The information in the previous document should be used to report on each of the problem web pages, with a list and advice on how to improve the performance of each page. With this in mind, the PageSpeed Insights page and the Screaming Frog «Overview» tab provide tips and solutions for the problems on each page.
-Check the performance: After moving the report and making the recommended changes, it is time to reanalyze the website and compare its performance. At this point, the percentage of pages that meet Core Web Vitals should be higher than in the last analysis.
