Believe it or not; waiting in lines is perhaps the most irritating, frustrating, and painful task that you would have ever done. Let’s face it. We all have waited in queue at airports, at grocery stores, restaurants, pubs, etc. However, we have never enjoyed this experience. So, how do you expect your customers to enjoy the experience of waiting for your page to load and get their chance to view your site! Think about it seriously. We all hate waiting. If you can delete this waiting time or at least minimize it, you would be able to give a pleasant experience to your customers.
Unfortunately, people wouldn’t mind waiting at grocery stores and ice-cream parlours but they would mind waiting for a website to load. Even a delay of just fraction of seconds can irritate your customers, who may then move away from your website and look for someone else. Now, we guess you have a very strong and valid reason for focusing on site speed optimization.
Here is what site speed is important for SEO
Search engine optimization is the process of optimizing your website in order to make it more search engine friendly, so that they crawl, index, and rank you better. SEO is the process of prioritising keywords that help rank better, implement content strategies, and detect issues that hinder you from ranking better. As per Google’s latest update, it also includes optimizing site’s speed.
Years back, link building used to be the most effective strategy for getting to the top positions. However, the current Panda and Penguin updates have clearly stated that irrelevant link building from poor quality websites are not going to help you. So, now you have only a handful of genuine and white hat ways that will help you reach the page one. One of those is providing an enhanced user experience. Search engines, especially Google, love websites that care for their customers. If you care for customers, make sure your website is easily navigable, has crisp content, and loads up almost instantly.
Google’s updates clearly mention that companies should treat SEO as ‘search experience optimization’ instead of ‘search engine optimization’. Businesses should stop thinking about bots and start thinking about users. Offering a hassle-free and delighted experience to users prompts search engines treat you more respectfully and give you a better ranking.
How site speed affects indexation, traffic, and rankings
It is now obvious that slow site speed leads to low user engagement. This means, your website will experience high bounce rate and low average time spent on page. Search engines, especially Google consider user behaviour to decide page rankings. The better the user behaviour, the better you will rank and vice versa. So, if your website has low user engagement, your ranking will suffer.
Other than traffic, site speed also affects indexation. When you will have a high bounce rate, search engines will not be able to crawl it for days and even for weeks. When a website isn’t crawled, search engines automatically degrade it. Contrary to this, when your website have a great speed, it gets crawled easily and this improves its indexation. The better the indexation, the better will be your rankings. Indexation is the key to achieve a better position in organic search results. you therefore, must not ignore your site’s performance and speed.
Your website’s speed is important for mobile devices as well
The use of mobile phones for accessing internet is growing tremendously. Increasing number of people these days are relying on their mobile devices to fulfil their internet-related needs. According to the latest research conducted by ‘The Search Agency’ in 2012, almost 30% of total paid clicks in Google came from mobile devices. Since more and more people are going to view your website through their Smartphones, you have to ensure that it loads up quickly in all forms of devices be it a desktop, a laptop or, a Smartphone.
Mobile devices have a short battery life, smaller memory and lower processing power. Even if your website loads faster in desktop or laptop, it may take quite some time to load in a smartphone. You therefore, have to transform it into a responsive website. Such sites load faster and adjust themselves automatically with all screen types.
How to identify your website’s performance
There are several tools and services that can help you evaluate your site’s performance. Most of them are categorised into two categories:
- Synthetic measurement services
- Real user measurement services
Synthetic measurement services are mostly free services that are available to anyone. One of them is WebPageTest.org. This free to use website can give you a detailed report of your website’s performance based on multiple factors such as multiple geographic locations, different browsers, connections, mobile devices, etc. The report will help you judge how your website reacts to these factors.
As the name suggests Real User Measurement (RUM) services judge your website’s performance, based on your real visitors’ experience. This can be tracked by adding a specific JavaScript code to it. There are many free as well as paid RUM services, one of them is Google Analytics. They help you decide your website’s performance based on page views, entrances, bounce rates, exit rates, etc.
If you haven’t yet thought of checking your website’s speed and improving its performance, its high time you must do so. If you need help, talk to us today SEO Agency in Phoenix
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