Requirements for SEO Web Vitals feature to work

Please note that the SEO Web Vitals feature is exclusive to Matomo On-Premise and is not available in Matomo Cloud.

There are several prerequisites that you will need if you want to monitor your SEO Web Vitals. The first and most basic is that any page you want to monitor must be fully public, connected to the internet and crawlable by search engines. Typically, this should already be the case if you are aiming to optimise a page for better results in search.

The next less obvious requirement is your page will need to have a valid SSL certificate enabled. The presence of an SSL certificate has also been a search engine ranking factor for a while now, so you should already have SSL enabled across your entire site if you want it to rank well. There are free services like Let’s Encrypt available through most web hosts if you don’t have an SSL certificate and need to set one up, but that is beyond the scope of this guide.

The final prerequisite is that any pages you want to measure must receive at least some regular visitors. This is because the data for your SEO Web Vitals are collected from visits to your website over 28 days. Therefore, you will want somewhat frequent page visits to any pages you’d like to analyse.

For new websites and pages, you may want to use marketing channels other than search to get some initial visits. For example, you could send out some email marketing content, share your link on social media and even run some display advertising for commercial pages.