Reflect Digital releases four reports on how prepared key industries are for Google’s new update: Core Web Vitals.

Expert search agency, Reflect Digital teamed up with SEO data specialists Authoritas and award-winning insurance brand and communications agency Free Partners to launch four insightful reports, exploring how prepared the eCommerce, legal, insurance and accountancy industries are for the next Google update: Core Web Vitals (CWV). 

Google announced that the Core Web Vitals update will roll out in June 2021, giving businesses very little time to prepare for these changes. The update consists of three metrics that quantify the page experience of a website - a new and additional ranking factor for search. This revolutionary change in search history is expected to have a notable impact on visibility for many businesses, something by which many companies are feeling rather unprepared. 

Reflect Digital, part of the LAB Group agencies, touched on the positives of the update, stating that “This is providing websites an incentive to improve their interactions with their users - if driving conversions was not enough! For us at Reflect Digital we’re heavily invested in creating more human-focused experiences for users, so we’re 100% behind Google on this update!”

The agency compared page experience to that when dining “By creating a better website experience the relationship we build with our audience is stronger. If you relate this to the experience you have in a restaurant – if the service was slow, food tasty but a bit cold, you wouldn’t be rushing back – your website can cause the same reaction. We want to ensure that all aspects of a user’s journey through a website seem logical and thought through. This update focuses on the first interaction with the website, the time it takes to load, and what happens when it is loading which is all vital to your first impressions of a website. The update is a big shift, but it’s important to see the immense benefits that this will have on the customer journey and UX improvements.”

The Google update focuses on making websites fit for human consumption, the ideal website will load fast and the elements won’t shift when loading. The implementation of Core Web Vitals demonstrates how Google is evolving and making sure the human-centric aspects are being considered, which is vital to maintain positive interactions and retain customers.

To equip businesses for these changes, Reflect Digital and Authoritas generated downloadable reports that take a deep dive into the new page experience metrics to see how prepared some of the UK’s leading brands are across fundamental sectors by exploring key data and observations. The method utilised Authoritas’ new CWV tool to interrogate URL’s for the top sites for each industry, then retrieved results across the following metrics; Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), First Input Delay (FID), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS).

The reports display incredibly interesting and in some cases shocking results in terms of page speed, interactivity and content shift. 

Read more about Core Web Vitals and download our reports below

Accountancy

Ecommerce

Insurance

Legal