As the most widely used search engine on the planet, and owner of many other digital properties that support all aspects of online search, Google is the authority on where your financial advisor website ranks in relevant online searches.
And while Google doesn’t reveal all the inner workings of its algorithms and how they ultimately rank content, the online search giant has always been clear on the importance of the user experience (UX). Part of this overall user experience is the quality of the interaction a visitor has on any given financial advisor website page, known as the page experience.
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To determine an overall page experience score, Google uses what they refer to as “Core Web Vitals” to evaluate these metrics and give your financial advisor website a ranking.
Google’s Core Web Vitals are comprised of three important components. The official names of these performance metrics used by Google are:
Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)
Interaction To Next Paint (INP)
Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)
However, if you haven’t even heard of these technical terms, you’re not alone. Put simply, these terms represent the following metrics that impact the performance of your financial advisor website:
Speed
LCP (Largest Contentful Paint) measures the amount of time it takes the majority, or main content on a webpage to load. Load time is an important part of the user experience because slow-loading content can be frustrating and cause visitors to exit websites.
This is even more important for users who came to your financial advisor website from a search query and are looking for specific content. If your financial advisor content takes too long to load, that visitor can very easily return to the search results and choose one of the other sources for the financial advisor content they are seeking.
While losing website visitors to faster-loading competitors is bad enough, slow load times can also impact another important SEO metric: the dreaded bounce rate.
Regardless of where that user goes next if they quickly “bounce” (i.e., leave) the page before your financial advisor content has fully loaded, this raises the bounce rate measured by Google Analytics, which can ultimately hurt organic SEO for your financial advisor website. In effect, Google interprets this as visitors not liking what they are finding on financial advisor websites.
For reference, Google is known to use 2.8 seconds or less as the range to get a “good” LCP score. Anything higher than that is a cause for concern.
Interactivity
INP (Interaction to Next Paint) is how Google determines the responsiveness of interactive elements on your financial advisor website, including click, tap, and keyboard interactions. If a page is responsive, then the time until another visual is shown to the user is shorter.
In that case, the user experience is presumed to be more positive and therefore results in a higher INP score. An example of an interaction on your financial advisor website that can contribute to the INP score is when a user completes a form. Once that user hits submit, the clock is running to “show” them something else, indicating responsiveness.
In this case, immediately displaying a confirmation to the user on the screen once the form has been completed will show a low (positive) INP score. If your current confirmation only comes in the form of an email, Google won’t see that and will think there was a slow/no response to this user action. Note: Prior to March 2024, Google replaced Input Delay (FID) as one of its Core Web Vitals.
Visual Stability
CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift) considers how a user’s experience with your financial advisor website is affected by unexpected or sudden layout shifts on their computer or mobile device. These shifts can create a negative experience, especially on smaller screens where this layout shift can cause the user to click in the wrong area, or possibly not be able to locate where they left off reading before the shift happened.
Some factors that can contribute to a high CLS are images and videos with dimensions that don’t match the space allotted on the page and some third-party widgets or other elements added after the original page content was developed and tested.
How Important Are Google’s Core Web Vitals to My Financial Advisor Website’s Search Ranking?
While Google doesn’t reveal the secret sauce, here’s a major clue to how important Core Web Vitals are to work on your financial advisor website: Google “highly recommends” that website owners or managers strive for good Core Web Vitals to achieve success with Google Search.
How Can I Check My Financial Advisor Website’s Core Web Vitals?
Your financial advisor website’s Core Web Vitals report can be accessed and viewed within the Google Search Console. However, as with other Google platform practices, you must first claim ownership of your financial advisor website.
Once confirmed, you can then view the Core Vitals report. The performance of your financial advisor website elements will be grouped as poor, needs improvement, or good. These groupings will show where you may need to make some improvements on these metrics.
How Can I Improve My Financial Advisor Website’s Core Web Vitals?
Speed Up Load Time
One of the most frequent problems for a webpage that loads slowly is the number and size of images on a given page. Not only will too many images slow down your financial advisor website load speeds, but it can also create unnecessary clutter and make it harder for users to navigate. The key is to strike the right balance of white space, text, and images on any page.
When it comes to website image size, bigger is not better. While it’s true that digital images being physically printed need to have a large file size to retain quality, that’s not the case for images being displayed in an online environment. In fact, if formatted properly, web-optimized images can have a smaller file size and load faster without sacrificing image quality.
Boost Interactivity/Responsiveness
Because Google wants to see a quick response time to user actions on your financial advisor website, you can deliver on this by adding more immediate actions/messages for your website visitors. Any time a visitor interacts with any of your website elements, make sure you have visual response in place to serve as 1) Confirmation for the user, 2) Evidence for Google that your financial advisor website responds quickly to user interactions.
Create More Visual Stability
To know what’s causing any visual layout disturbances to your financial advisor content, it’s recommended to review all images compared to their allotted specs within the page design. Additionally, a review of all third-party add-ons, widgets, iframes, or the like could be wreaking havoc on your financial advisor’s CLS score.
