How To Improve Page Speed For SEO Rankings
Digital marketing campaigns that include services like SEO, PPC, social media and email marketing can be successful or fail for a variety of reasons. Some of those reasons have to do with things like the content that’s used in the ads, the target audience, the budget, the time the ads are run and more. However, one thing that will hurt any campaign, regardless of how well it is set up, is the load time of each page.
Imagine running a campaign where you target a specific audience with an ad that intrigues them to take an action. Then, imagine if that user visits the site only to wait 5 seconds, 9 seconds and then even 20 seconds for a page to load and nothing. Do you think that lost lead is the result of poor marketing or poor page speed?
Benefits Of Improving Page Speed
Faster page speed times mean better results for all your marketing efforts including search engine optimization. The reality is that consumers have very little time and patience for your ads. If you want them to take an action you need to be direct and give them the information they want as well as simplifying their process to take an action. The harder it is for them to take that action, or the longer it takes, the less likely they will move forward.
How To Improve Page Speed For SEO Purposes
It will never benefit you to try and get rankings under SEO or any other marketing campaign if you are directing traffic to pages that have slow load times. If you want to improve your marketing, improve your site starting with:
- Minimize all HTTP requests: By combining separate files you can drastically reduce the amount of information your pages have to carry. Less code still allows you to get rankings but doesn’t slow the page down.
- Optimizing server performance: In some cases it could be a hosting problem. Look at your hosting and make sure you have enough room on your server for everything you’re throwing at your site.
- Lower the amount of redirects: While redirects can have major advantages for SEO, they require the server to make an extra trip meaning they slow down load times and can even make it more difficult for content to display.
- Improve mobile responsiveness: Often the website looks great but it’s the mobile version that is struggling with page uploads. If that’s the case, you may miss on the problem but still see high bounce rates in your campaigns.
- Optimize and possibly compress images: Often forgotten about, image sizes can add major storage problems to a page, slowing down each loading time and causing major delays. By compressing the images, you can significantly cut down on what the page has to bring up each time someone visits it.
Speed is the name of the game as you want your system to work at the user’s speed, not the other way around. The more you can give them as far as quality service and website functionality, the higher your chances of seeing engagement and even sales.
How Does Page Speed Impact SEO Rankings?
Because Google prioritizes things like page speed when determining SEO rankings, websites looking for those top page rankings have to focus on the optimization of each page, load time and content. If one thing is off, even by a little, it can cost a page or site top page rankings and potentially thousands of clicks each month.
The longer a user spends on your page, the lower your bounce rate which is a good thing. However, if the page doesn’t even load for them, how long do you think they will stay? Review your website and check out each page, desktop, tablet and mobile versions to make sure they are working with the right amount of speed.