NEWS
Research: Core Web Vitals Ranking Boost by Industry
Enterprise SEO Platform provider BrightEdge produced a report comparing for industries to understand Core Web Vitals performance. They discovered which kinds of sites were best positioned to receive a Google ranking boost and why some others were missing out.
Methodology
BrightEdge reviewed the top sites across four verticals across five hundred keywords. They selected the pages that ranked for those top five hundred keywords so that the results of the study reflected an approximation of the actual Core Web Vitals in the search engine results pages.
BrightEdge noted about their methodology:
“Mobile page speed performance on all URLs was measured and aggregated from the CrUX Database. We tested this specifically for mobile because of the importance and roll-out of Mobile-First Indexing.”
Google has said that the Core Web Vitals scores will be an aggregate of groups of pages on a site. As pages are reached by actual users who are opted in to report back CWV scores, these are archived and publicly made available as the CrUX Database.
Google’s Mueller commented on how core web vitals are calculated:
“…What happens with the field data is we don’t have data points for every page.
So we, for the most part, we need to have kind of groupings of individual pages.
And depending on the amount of data that we have, that can be a grouping of the whole website (kind of the domain).
…I think in the Chrome User Experience Report they use the origin which would be the subdomain and the protocol there.
So that would be kind of the overarching kind of grouping.
And if we have more data for individual parts of a website then we’ll try to use that.”
Using the CWV scores of the top ranked pages and also the CrUX data is a realistic place to begin for finding out how likely the businesses in these sectors will receive a ranking boost related to Core Web Vitals.
Four Industries Ranked for Core Web Vitals
BrightEdge ranked four business niches.
Four Niches Ranked:
- Finance
- Business to Business (B2B)
- Educational
- Retail
Finance Core Web Vitals – #1 Winner
The most competitive niche in this comparison of four industries is finance and that’s hardly surprising.
Banking, loans, mortgages, credit cards and most anything to do with money have traditionally been highly competitive in terms of search engine optimization.
24% of top URLs in the finance sector would receive a boost. Informational sites were the best optimized and positioned to receive a ranking boost. Banking and aggregator sites need most improvement
B2B – Second Most Competitive CWV Niche
B2B is a niche comprising a wide range of industries. It could be anything from restaurant supplies to human resources management software. My experience working with B2B companies is that they are fairly text heavy and not overly burdened by media files.
So it wasn’t too surprising to see that this niche had the second most competitive rankings.
A full 13% of top ranked sites would likely receive a ranking boost.
Although this means that most sites in the B2B niche would probably not receive a ranking boost, sites in this niche shouldn’t count on that. SEO (and winning in general) is about doing the best that can possibly be done, after all.
According to the BrightEdge report, informational sites in the B2B niche tended to do well. B2B transactional sites did less well because of video and other interactive content.
Educational Sites – Third Place
Education related websites came in third place with a dramatically lower amount of sites on the receiving end of a Core Web Vitals ranking boost.
Less than than 5% of sites in the educational sector would get a ranking boost. Similar to B2B and the Finance areas, informational and resource pages performed best.
App stores and sites with dynamic content performing less well.
Retail Sites – Biggest Losers
Retail sites brought up the bottom end, representing the most challenged niche of all four.
Of the top three niches it was the informational sites that tended to do well and the transactional end of those niches representing the least likely to receive a ranking boost.
Seen from that perspective perhaps it’s not surprising that the mostly purely transactional Retail sector may struggle to achieve a Google Page Experience ranking boost.
Nearly zero retail sites would receive a ranking boost. The top reasons for the poor performance were hero images and sales pop-ups dragging down LCP and Layout Shift scores.
The bright spot in the retail sector was review sites. Review sites in the retail sectors are the best optimized to receive a ranking boost.
BrightEdge Report Key Findings
The report by BrightEdge summarized their findings:
- “The Mobile Experience is critical for all categories.
- Image compression seems to be a leading challenge for leading brands.
- Pages doing well for CWV tend to be informational in nature.
- Retail, in particular, could see significant disruption if second-tier retailers receive a boost.”
According to Jim Yu, CEO, BrightEdge:
“We see that some sectors may be more prepared than others for Google’s Page Experience Update and Core Web Vitals. Our research shows that there are some commonalities across industries.
For example, challenges with mobile image compression. However, it’s important to remember that – especially in large enterprises, nuances and challenges differ- and what the roll-out may look like today may differ entirely over time and in May.
That will all depend on how Enterprise Search and Digital Marketers work to prescribe the right course of action to meet core vital benchmarks and how they convince and collaborate with the rest of the organization including IT and web development”
Core Web Vitals is a Challenge
Achieving top scores for the Core Web Vitals metrics is challenging because many of the issues needing to be fixed are not the fault of the publishers and businesses. The issues needing to be fixed tend to be related to how the content management system (CMS) and themes used are designed.
For example, a retail site depends on the shopping platform they choose to be coded in a way that reduces the amount of code necessary to render a web page and to have that code presented in a way that doesn’t block the main thread rendering.
That has not traditionally been a typical coding practice by most CMS and shopping platform developers because until this year there hasn’t been a demand from publishers and retailers for that kind of coding.
But that’s not an excuse to use to not try to fix the issues that are inherent in many, perhaps most content management systems and themes.
Citation
Watch the full and complete BrightEdge Report on Core Web Vitals
