Slide 14 of 39
How Does an SEO Company Improve Website User Experience for SEO?
User experience work for SEO starts from Core Web Vitals field data in Search Console. From there, an SEO company fixes the failing templates that carry the most traffic first, cleans up navigation so key pages are easy to reach, and re-tests until field data confirms each fix. Across the web, Largest Contentful Paint fails most often on mobile, but your own field data decides what to fix first.
What Page Experience Does and Does Not Do for Rankings
Google’s page experience documentation states: “Core Web Vitals are used by our ranking systems.” In a separate answer on the same page, it says there is no single page experience signal and that its core ranking systems look at a variety of signals. It also warns that good results in Search Console’s Core Web Vitals report or third-party tools “doesn’t guarantee that your pages will rank at the top of Google Search results” and that page experience covers more than the scores.
So treat Core Web Vitals work as one ranking input among many, with a second payoff after the click. Google’s 2018 mobile page speed benchmarks, based on Google/SOASTA research from 2017, found that “as page load time goes from one second to 10 seconds, the probability of a mobile site visitor bouncing increases 123%.” A visitor who leaves before the page loads cannot convert or link on that visit.
Step 1: Start From Field Data
Search Console’s Core Web Vitals report is the starting point because it is built from what visitors experienced. It groups similar URLs, splits mobile from desktop, and gives each group the status of its worst metric; the group values describe the experience of 75% of page requests over the last 28 days. Lab tools such as Lighthouse and PageSpeed Insights then help find the cause on a single URL; where these checks sit in a full audit is covered by how an SEO company conducts a technical SEO audit.
The thresholds come from Google’s Core Web Vitals guidance, measured at the 75th percentile of page loads. The pass rates come from the 2025 Web Almanac, built on Chrome UX Report data:
| Metric | What it measures | Good | Rated good in 2025, mobile | Rated good in 2025, desktop |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) | Time until the largest visible element renders | Within 2.5 seconds | 62% | 74% |
| Interaction to Next Paint (INP) | Delay between a tap, click or keypress and the next visual update | 200 milliseconds or less | 77% | 97% |
| Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) | Unexpected movement of content while the page loads | 0.1 or less | 81% | 72% |
Across all three metrics, the Web Almanac counts 48% of mobile sites with good Core Web Vitals in 2025, up from 44% in 2024 and 36% in 2023; desktop moved from 48% to 55% to 56%. On mobile, LCP has the lowest pass rate of the three; the widest gap between mobile and desktop is in INP.
One caution before blaming the site: Google’s report help notes that a group sitting near a threshold can change status without any change to the site, for example after a large swing in traffic or a shift in the browsers and networks visitors use.
Step 2: Fix the Templates That Carry the Most Traffic
Google’s own advice in the report help is to fix everything labeled Poor first, then, within a status, to prioritize the issues that affect the most URLs or your most important URLs. A problem that sits in a shared template, theme code or a third-party script repeats on every URL that uses it, so one fix can move a whole URL group. For example, a product template used across 5,000 URLs with a failing LCP goes ahead of a single landing page with a minor CLS issue.
These fixes touch templates, hosting or theme code, so settle before signing who implements them. An agency may ship code changes itself, or write tickets for your developers and verify the result. If your team has no developer time, ask for implementation to be priced into the scope.
Step 3: Fix LCP Part by Part
Google’s guide to optimizing LCP breaks every LCP time into four parts with no gaps between them: time to first byte, resource load delay, resource load duration and element render delay. On a page that misses the 2.5-second mark, the guide’s rough target is about 40% each for the first byte and the load duration, and under 10% each for the two delays. It also warns: “In some cases, an optimization applied to one part won’t improve LCP, it will just shift the time saved to another part.” Its example is a compressed hero image on a page whose LCP element stays hidden until JavaScript finishes loading; the saving moves into render delay and LCP does not improve.
The fixes follow the parts:
| LCP part | What slows it | Fix |
|---|---|---|
| Time to first byte | Server redirects, distance from the server, poor networks, cache misses caused by URL parameters | Caching, a content delivery network, fewer redirects |
| Resource load delay | An LCP image that is lazy-loaded or referenced only from CSS or JavaScript | Make the image discoverable in the HTML, preload it, set a high fetch priority |
| Resource load duration | Large files traveling far | Smaller, modern-format images at the right size; a content delivery network; caching |
| Element render delay | Render-blocking stylesheets and scripts, content hidden until JavaScript runs | Reduce or inline render-blocking CSS; defer scripts the first screen does not need |
The guide also warns: “Never lazy-load your LCP image, as that will always lead to unnecessary resource load delay, and will have a negative impact on LCP.” Chrome DevTools shows the four parts for a page, and a WebPageTest waterfall shows which request starts late.
Step 4: Fix INP and CLS
INP suffers when long tasks occupy the browser’s main thread. Google’s guide to long tasks defines a long task as any task that takes longer than 50 milliseconds, and its INP guide recommends breaking work in event callbacks into separate tasks so the browser can respond in between. On a marketing site, a reasonable first place to look is heavy scripts such as chat widgets, ad tags and other third-party code.
CLS can come from content that loads without reserved space. Google’s guide to optimizing CLS names images without dimensions and ads, embeds and iframes without dimensions among the causes, and tells developers to include width and height attributes on images and video elements or reserve the space with CSS aspect-ratio. Ad slots get a reserved container before the ad arrives.
Navigation People and Crawlers Can Follow
The other half of user experience is whether a visitor reaches the page they want without backtracking. An agency checks how many clicks key pages sit from the home page, replaces internal jargon in menu labels with the words visitors search for, and finds orphan pages that no internal link reaches. Orphan pages can also be missed in crawling, and those fixes belong to how an SEO company improves crawlability and indexing; reorganizing a hierarchy is part of how an SEO company optimizes website structure.
Breadcrumbs help visitors on deep pages. Marked up with BreadcrumbList structured data, they can appear in Google’s results, but only on desktop: Google’s Search Central changelog records that it stopped showing them in mobile results in January 2025.
Device-specific work, from the viewport tag to tap targets and intrusive pop-ups, is part of how an SEO company optimizes websites for mobile SEO. Search Console’s Mobile Usability report, still named in older checklists, was retired on December 1, 2023.
How to Check the Agency’s Work
Three pieces of evidence show whether the work held: Search Console’s Core Web Vitals report before and after, by URL group and device; the list of templates fixed, ranked by the traffic they carry; and the validation status of each fixed issue. Validation in Search Console runs a 28-day monitoring window on field data and does not trigger re-indexing, so judge a fix only after that window has passed.