The projects we’ll talk about in this chapter are all good things to focus on, but they may require more work and have less benefit than the “quick win” projects from the previous part. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do them. This is just to help you get an idea of how to prioritize various projects.
Page experience signals
These are lesser ranking factors, but still things you want to look at for the sake of your users. They cover aspects of the website that impact user experience (UX).
Core Web Vitals
Core Web Vitals are the speed metrics that are part of Google’s Page Experience signals used to measure user experience. The metrics measure visual load with Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), visual stability with Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS), and interactivity with First Input Delay (FID).
HTTPS
HTTPS protects the communication between your browser and server from being intercepted and tampered with by attackers. This provides confidentiality, integrity, and authentication to the vast majority of today’s WWW traffic. You want your pages loaded over HTTPS and not HTTP.
Any website that shows a “lock” icon in the address bar is using HTTPS.
Mobile-friendliness
Simply put, this checks if webpages display properly and are easily used by people on mobile devices.
How do you know how mobile-friendly your site is? Check the “Mobile Usability” report in Google Search Console.
This report tells you if any of your pages have mobile-friendliness issues.
Interstitials
Interstitials block content from being seen. These are popups that cover the main content and that users may have to interact with before they go away.
Hreflang — For multiple languages
Hreflang is an HTML attribute used to specify the language and geographical targeting of a webpage. If you have multiple versions of the same page in different languages, you can use the hreflang tag to tell search engines like Google about these variations. This helps them to serve the correct version to their users.
General maintenance/website health
These tasks aren’t likely to have much impact on your rankings but are generally good things to fix for user experience.
Broken links
Broken links are links on your site that point to non-existent resources. These can be either internal (i.e., to other pages on your domain) or external (i.e., to pages on other domains).
You can find broken links on your website quickly with Site Audit in the Links report. It’s free in Ahrefs Webmaster Tools.
Redirect chains
Redirect chains are a series of redirects that happen between the initial URL and the destination URL.
You can find redirect chains on your website quickly with Site Audit in the Redirects report. It’s free in Ahrefs Webmaster Tools.
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