Transcript of Episode:
Jonathan Fashbaugh:
Hi there. Welcome to Marketing Chairside by Pro Impressions Marketing. I am your host, Jonathan Fashbaugh. And today I have David Ingerman from the Impressions Marketing development department. David, thanks for being here.
David Ingerman:
Of course. Hi everyone.
Jonathan Fashbaugh:
Thanks for responding to being voluntold with a, “Yes, sir. I guess so.”
David Ingerman:
Definitely.
Jonathan Fashbaugh:
We are talking about sort of a high tech topic and what’s funny is this is, I guess technically it’s our fourth run at this.
David Ingerman:
Yes.
Jonathan Fashbaugh:
And we had just delay after delay, but the topic is still relevant almost a year after we initially said, “Hey, we should do a show on this.”
David Ingerman:
Yes.
Jonathan Fashbaugh:
And I guess it’s because Google thinks it’s kind of core to the user experience and vital one might say. And so David, you are here to explain some of the uber nerdy jargon that Google lays on us. And there are so many criteria that we’ll see kind of on a screen share here in a minute. But let’s start with Cumulative Layout Shift. What the heck is that?
David Ingerman:
Yes. So Cumulative Layout Shift, it’s a metric. It’s going to measure any unexpected layout shifts on the page once it’s loaded. The reason why we look at that metric is if we have too many shifts of content on the page, it is going to lead to a bad user experience.
Jonathan Fashbaugh:
I mean, I know I hate it when I’m trying to use a website on my phone and I go to click on something and all of a sudden it’s like, “Congratulations, you clicked on an ad.”
David Ingerman:
Yes.
Jonathan Fashbaugh:
I’m like, “No, I didn’t do that.”
David Ingerman:
Yeah, or for example, you’re reading a blog and you’re about halfway through and all of a sudden the text moves and now you’re scrolling up and down trying to figure out where your place was at. And like I said, it just doesn’t lead to a good user experience when that happens.
Jonathan Fashbaugh:
And Google in 2020 said, “We’ve heard the cry of the people. Enough is enough. We’re going to build this into our algorithm.” And so, now websites that do that less, especially during the load of the website, and I guess it’s actually, it’s based on the percentage of the content that stays set after it loads, correct?
David Ingerman:
Exactly. Yes.
Jonathan Fashbaugh:
We want to minimize that for our users. And then another key metric that they look at is pagespeed or load speed. Can you, I mean, somewhat self-explanatory, but tell us, I mean you’re a tech wizard, what does that mean?
David Ingerman:
Yes, again, page load speed is another metric that we keep focused on. It’s just ensuring that the content is going to load as fast as possible for our end users. When it comes to getting on a website, if it doesn’t load within two to three seconds, you probably already lost interest. You’re going to move on. So when it comes to our dentist, if your site is not loading within that two to three second timeframe, you unfortunately might have just lost a patient. They’re going to go to another dentist website that’s going to be a faster load time. And that’s just with this high paced society, we’re just so used to things loading, split second.
Jonathan Fashbaugh:
That was a snappy response. I appreciate you pointing out the whole patient experience thing too, because that’s very true. My brain keeps going to Google, because when I first started working in this industry, we were 100% focused on SEO pretty much. But as Google has gotten better at understanding who’s a good dentist and who is a dentist that I don’t know anything about, or that is causing a user to not enjoy their experience on their device, when they use Google, they’re going to ding them. But you could be ranking well and have these problems and then your marketing spend is, you’re going to spend more per patient brought in the door because people are like, “I don’t have time for this,” and bail.
David Ingerman:
Yeah.
Jonathan Fashbaugh:
Now one technical question, because I have been on our own websites, where our website loads… I swear you got a better snap than I do. Our website loads, and I scroll down and there’ll be a blank space for a second and then an image loads. Is that Cumulative Layout Shift?
David Ingerman:
Good question. And no, it’s not. And so what we do to avoid causing that bad layout shift is we actually dedicate space for that image. And we do that by adding a height and a width specified so that when the page loads, it’s going to dedicate a section on the page for the image to load into so that none of the content on the page will load once the image appears.
Jonathan Fashbaugh:
I get it. And if I get it, then everyone gets it. So one of the things I want to show our viewers is how they can look at their own score. And for those of you on the podcast, what I’ve done is pulled up a screen with PageSpeed Insights. And you can find this by just going to Google and searching for Google PageSpeed Insights. And this is a website run by Google and I doubt that it’s a direct doorway into how Google actually evaluates these. I think it’s a tool to kind of have a cheat sheet because Google wants you to have a good website and have a fast website. And so, what I’ve done is searched one of our clients in here, and this is really what you want to see is a past status here and green lights everywhere. If you’re not getting a perfect grade or a passing grade, you’ll see an orange or a red. And you’ll see here desktop and mobile, and that’s because on mobile, this is tough. They grade you on a 3G connection. What’s that about, David?
David Ingerman:
Yeah. Well, and the reason they do that is because there’s still people out there that use 3G. And so, we want to make sure that the user experience is good for them as well. We don’t want to leave them out.
Jonathan Fashbaugh:
Or in my case, when you’re living in rural Missouri.
David Ingerman:
Yes.
Jonathan Fashbaugh:
It’s very nice to have fast loading websites on a slow connection. But you can see this website gets at 85 and that’s actually pretty good for a 3G connection. And you can see portions of the website, it kind of looks like it’s incomplete. And that’s just because of the caching and different secret sauce things we do to make sure that this actually does load quickly. But you can see the progression here. So it’s a process to load a website in the first place, but if things don’t go well and things are bouncing around, I think it’s kind of like a crazy rollercoaster. It can be fun, but if it’s painful, I don’t have time to go on rides that are going to hurt me.
David Ingerman:
Yeah.
Jonathan Fashbaugh:
Make it not fun to go on again.
David Ingerman:
Exactly.
Jonathan Fashbaugh:
So that’s kind of core web vitals, it’s a rollercoaster, folks. But David, thank you so much for being here and helping our dentists and office managers and consultants understand core web vitals.
David Ingerman:
Of course. Thank you for having me.
Jonathan Fashbaugh:
Yeah. And you the user, what you can do, if you want more information like this, go to our website , and you can subscribe to getting these delivered straight to your inbox. You can subscribe on YouTube and get notifications, Facebook, Instagram, wherever you’re finding this. Thanks for watching and until next time, I wish you the best of luck on the internet.
