Core Web Vitals
Core Web Vitals are the subset of Google's Web Vitals. Core Web Vitals only contains three metrics that aim to measure the speed, interactivity, and visual stability of publicly crawlable webpages.
Search Engine Optimization
Core Web Vitals is part of Google's Page Experience ranking signal, and data can be viewed in:
How does Google collect Core Web Vitals data of webpages?
Core Web Vitals data (when meeting certain conditions) is send to their CrUX database, which is part of Google's ecosystem. It's then only Google that is using such pagespeed data for SEO purposes.
As a result, other search engines are not using Core Web Vitals data for SEO purposes. In general, chances are that speed isn't a ranking factor amongst other search engines.
International traffic on a single domain
When your site or shop receives visitors from multiple countries, there is an important SEO nuance.
When it comes to ranking, individual pages could get their own Core Web Vitals data. So, your Dutch pages typically written for Dutch audiences would then not be impacted by traffic from non-Dutch speaking countries. This is convenient as Dutch people are typically dealing with optimal device and speed conditions, so they then have a chance of doing good when it comes to SEO.
Spain vs Venezuela
But when you've pages written in Spanish, meant to be found by people searching from both Spain, Venezuela and other Spanish speaking countries, your situation looks very different. People from different localities will end up visiting the same page URL's. So, if more than 25% of pageviews are coming from countries with typically worse internet (or less wealthy with an above-average usage of slower devices), then it is directly affecting your SERP's in Spain.
In this specific scenario, at time of writing:
- Venezuela's bandwidth at the 75th percentile is 8 Mbps;
- Spain's bandwidth is 49 Mbps, according to Cloudflare Radar data;
- meaning that internet speed in Venezuela is 6 times as slow compared to the bandwidth in Spain;
- That's one huge factor besides latency and devices that users are using to visit webpages.
An example of differences within a RUMvision geography panel for the LCP metric for an international shop:
As a result, it will also be unrealistic to compare yourselves with competitors, when such competitor doesn't share the same audience nor locality characteristics.
Other nuances of Core Web Vitals
- (Core) Web Vitals inherit the same limitations as CrUX data;
- You can only view data at the 75th percentile;
- You cannot filter and segment beyond mobile, desktop, tablet and page-level data;
- Core Web Vitals is showing numbers and distributions, but isn't telling you which element is causing issues;
- While it helps in showing remaining issues, it might not be sufficient to troubleshoot.
for a deeper dive in investigating why data is showing the numbers it is, investing in a full RUM solution to supplement CrUX can give you access to more detailed information than can be made available in a publicly queryable dataset. This can help you explain and improve your metrics in a number of ways.
web.dev
Continue reading about Core Web Vitals
Want to learn more about Core Web Vitals, their thresholds, what to do if you're failing and Google's own docs? You'll find it here:
- Core Web Vitals thresholds and understanding them
- Core Web Vitals assessment failed
- Core Web Vitals on web.dev