Core Web Vitals Impact on Google Business Profile Landing Pages

When we analyze the landing pages earning the top rankings, there’s little difference compared to the aggregate data.

What do the Core Web Vitals Scores Mean?

We’ve outlined below how Core Web Vitals scores are categorized as poor, needs improvement, and good.

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) Scores

• Good: <= 2.5s
• Needs Improvement: <=4s
• Poor: >4s

Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) Scores

• Good: <= 0.10
• Needs Improvement: <=0.25
• Poor: >0.25

First Input Delay (FID) Scores

• Good: <= 100ms
• Needs Improvement: <=300ms
• Poor: >300ms

Mobile Performance Scores – Performance score is a weighted average of all the CWV metric scores.

• Good: 90 – 100
• Needs Improvement: 50 – 89
• Poor: 0-49

Local Business Websites Are Performing Poorly & Still Ranking

From this snapshot, we see that mobile performance scores and Core Web Vitals don’t have a big impact when it comes to rank. Most landing pages received a “poor” score for quality experience, with the exception of Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS). 

We hypothesize 61% of local businesses studied scored well for CLS because these sites likely don’t host ads or other dynamic content, and thus offer more visual stability for a site visitor. While you should get test results for your own site, most local businesses will likely have to focus their attention on improving scores for Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), First Input Delay (FID) and Mobile Performance. 

Local businesses likely score poorly for LCP & FID due to website hosts with slow server response time, unoptimized images and videos, and bloated Javascript on the site with no developers to address the problem or help reduce Long Tasks.

Why Do Core Web Vitals Matter For Local Search?

While Core Web Vitals don’t appear to have a big affect on rankings right now, website managers should strive to provide the best experience for visitors and these metrics can help you determine what to work on. 

Every business should care about improving website experience. Google is currently rolling out more updates based on page experience signals, and websites that ignore low Core Web Vitals scores could be negatively affected in the very near future.

User experience is a conversion factor. If your website isn’t providing a positive experience, you will lose prospective customers. Even if your site ranks well, a poor user experience can lead to lost sales.

Google found that 53% of visits to a mobile site are abandoned if the page takes longer than 3 seconds to load. Using a neural network to look at bounce rates and conversion data, it found that when load times increase from 1 to 7 seconds, there is a 113% increase in the probability of visitors bouncing from the site.

When we look at the first page results in the Local Finder, 83% of the websites are taking longer than 4 seconds to load content for the visitor, and the average load time was 9.5 seconds.

This means most businesses are leaving money on the table from prospective customers bouncing back to the results. Don’t fumble acquiring a customer at the last yard line. If you want to get the most out of your hard-earned ranking, make sure your site speed is optimized and your Core Web Vitals are in check.