A recent study came up with a report comparing “four distinct markets that have different sites that dominate their categories.”
The four markets are:
- Finance
- Business to Business (B2B)
- Educational
- Retail
The graphic below will explain to you the effect that Google’s upcoming Page Experience update will have on rankings for each of the markets as a whole.
The report suggests that around a quarter of the top finance sites are prepared to receive a boost. While about 13% of the B2B sites would benefit, less than 5% of the educational sites and almost none of the retail sites would enjoy a boost in rankings if Google flipped the switch.
It was found that the differences between the industries’ expected results were primarily due to the nature of the typical website features normally found on the sites within each market. For example, the finance sector features sites that are often informational and competitive in terms of search engine optimization. While on the other hand, education and retail sites are more media and image-orientated – features that are more challenging to optimize for speed, thereby reducing Core Web Vitals performance.
Here are the key findings:
1. The Mobile Experience is critical for all categories.
2. Image compression seems to be a leading challenge for the best of brands.
3. Pages doing well for CWV tend to be informational in nature.
4. Retail, in particular, could see significant disruption if second-tier retailers receive a boost
The report concludes that you should focus on:
1. Reducing your Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) reduces user bounce rates. Reducing First Contentful Paint can improve conversions by as much as 15%. Your audience has other things they want to do, and you should respect their time.
2. Improving Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) provides your audience a visually stable and engaging experience. Layout shift disrupts the user experience and annoys your audience. Annoyed users don’t convert well.
3. Improving First Input Delay (FID) helps a website respond quickly to the actions your audience takes. The quicker your site responds to a user’s actions, the crisper their experience is. Users are less likely to return to a website that they feel is poorly designed or broken.