Your website might look great to visitors with fast loading, a clean design, and ease of use. But Google assesses your site differently by analysing content quality, relevance, and technical SEO signals like Core Web Vitals, security, and site structure.

We’ve been helping Brisbane businesses fix these hidden issues since 2011. After working on hundreds of websites, we have a pretty solid idea of what Google actually looks for.

In this article, we’ll cover the main website SEO features Google checks first and how Core Web Vitals affect your rankings. You’ll also learn about content signals that help search engines understand your pages.

Read on to see how your site measures up to Google’s standards.

What Website SEO Features Does Google Check First?

Google evaluates technical SEO features like HTTPS security, mobile usability, XML sitemaps, and page speed when crawling and indexing your site. If critical issues block Google from accessing your pages or confuse its crawlers, your pages might not get indexed properly or rank as well as they should.

And as we already mentioned, your website can look perfectly fine from the front end. Customers can browse, add products to the cart, and fill out forms with no issues at all. But behind the scenes, technical SEO errors can silently block search engines from crawling your pages properly.

Most site owners only realise something is wrong when their rankings tank or their pages vanish from search results entirely. But don’t worry, you can easily spot these early if you know what to look for.

Here are the main technical elements that Google evaluates first:

• HTTPS Security: According to Google’s own publication, it uses HTTPS as a ranking signal, so secure sites have a small advantage over HTTP. If your site shows “Not Secure” in the browser, it can reduce trust for users and impact how they interact with your pages.
• Mobile-First Indexing: Google now crawls and indexes the mobile version of your site first. So if your mobile experience is slow, clunky, or missing content, it can directly affect how your pages rank.
• XML Sitemap: This file lists the important pages on your website so search engines can find and understand them more easily. It helps Google find pages across your site structure quickly, rather than relying on links alone.
• Robots.txt File: Site owners use this file to tell search engines which pages to crawl or skip. One wrong line in this file can accidentally block your most important pages from Google’s index.
• Canonical Tags: When multiple URLs show the same thing, duplicate content becomes a problem. The solution is canonical tags, which point Google to the version you actually want to rank.
• Page Speed: Google uses page speed and Core Web Vitals as part of its page experience signals. These metrics can influence rankings, but they play a smaller role compared to content relevance.

Simply put, these elements control how well your site gets seen, processed, and surfaced.

What Are Core Web Vitals?

Core Web Vitals are three speed metrics that Google uses to measure your website’s performance for real users. They’re Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), Interaction to Next Paint (INP), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS).

Google confirmed these metrics as a ranking factor back in 2021. While many sites still struggle to meet the recommended thresholds, improving your metric scores can give you an edge (especially when competing pages offer similar content).

We’ll now explain these three metrics of Core Web Vitals.

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)

Google wants your page’s largest visible element to load within 2.5 seconds. That element could be a hero image, a video thumbnail, or a large block of text. Whatever takes up the most screen space when your page first loads, LCP measures that.

Basically, if anything takes over 2.5 seconds to load, you need to improve it. The usual culprits are unoptimised images and slow server response times. For example, an e-commerce site running heavy product images without compression will struggle here.

Interaction to Next Paint (INP)

Fast response times keep users engaged and signal quality to Google. INP measures how quickly your page reacts when someone clicks a button, taps a link, or fills out a form.

Google has replaced First Input Delay (FID) with INP in March 2024. They did it because FID only measured the first interaction, while INP tracks every interaction throughout the visit.

Speed insight: Sites loaded with heavy JavaScript often score poorly, which drags down user engagement over time.

Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)

You’ve probably experienced this issue yourself, where you’re about to tap a link on your phone, but suddenly the page shifts. When that happens, you can end up clicking something else, like an ad, without meaning to (it can make your site feel broken even if it’s not).

To measure these layout shifts, CLS looks at how stable your page remains while it loads, and Google recommends keeping this score below 0.1. The most common cause behind this problem is usually images or ads loading without set dimensions. And when the browser doesn’t know how much space to reserve, content jumps around.

You can prevent these layout shifts easily by setting the width and height attributes for your page elements.

What Content Signals Help Search Engines Understand Your Pages?

Content signals that help search engines interpret your pages include title tags, header structure, descriptive alt text, schema markup, and internal links. These elements support your content by giving Google a clearer context. Even strong pages can struggle to perform as well as they could without these components.

These are the main content signals that Google looks for on your pages:

• Title Tags and Meta Descriptions: These elements appear in search results and tell users what to expect. A clear, keyword-relevant title helps Google understand your page topic at a glance.
• Header Hierarchy: Your H1 should describe the main topic, with H2s and H3s breaking the topic down. This structure helps Google follow the logic of your content.
• Descriptive Alt Text: Google can analyse images, but it still relies on alt text for clear context. Adding descriptive alt text helps search engines better understand what’s shown.
• Schema Markup: This code gives search engines extra context about your content type. Products, recipes, and reviews all have schema options that can make your listings more visible in search results.
• Internal Links: When you connect your site’s relevant pages with internal links, you help Google understand your site structure more clearly. Strong internal linking also passes authority between pages, which can improve their ability to rank.

The components we’ve discussed here give your content the structure it needs to perform reliably in search.

How Do You Check What Google Sees?

You can check what Google sees on your site by using free tools like Google Search Console (GSC) and PageSpeed Insights. These tools show you exactly what’s working and what needs fixing.

Let’s get into more detail about GSC and PageSpeed Insights.

Google Search Console

This free tool gives you direct access to how Google views your site. You can see which pages have been added to Google’s index, which ones are missing, and why.

Not only that, but GSC also flags crawl errors, redirect chains, and mobile usability issues. If Google is having trouble accessing certain pages, this is where you’ll find out about it (which can speed up troubleshooting a lot).

And if you’ve made updates to a page, you can request Google to recrawl it directly from here. This way, you don’t have to wait around hoping that Google will notice your updates.

PageSpeed Insights

Once you’ve checked indexing, you should test your site’s speed performance with PageSpeed Insights. It runs your URL through Google’s Core Web Vitals assessment and shows exactly how your page performs in terms of load speed.

More importantly, you get separate scores for the mobile device and desktop performance of your site. Since a site can run well on a desktop but perform poorly on mobile, and Google prioritises mobile indexing, it’s important to review both versions of your site.

Reality check: A “good” PageSpeed score alone doesn’t guarantee rankings if competitors offer better content.

Make Your Website Easier for Google to Find

Google runs through a checklist before your site even has a shot at ranking. HTTPS, mobile-first indexing, sitemaps, Core Web Vitals, and content signals all play a part. If any of these elements are off, your pages might never reach the people searching for what you offer.

To check how your site is doing, you can take help from GSC and PageSpeed Insights. They’ll show you exactly what needs attention. Analyse your site, run it through both tools, and note the flagged issues. Then you can fix the problems yourself or get professional help.

If you’re not sure where to begin or want a second pair of eyes, get in touch with our team.