The G0ld Room: Why Your SEO Has a Need for Speed

2.1.17

Why Your SEO Has a Need for Speed – HW #99

Hi there boys and girls! It’s a beautiful day in the Stone Temple neighborhood. You know, postman Mr. McFeely understands that delivering web pages quickly is very important. So I asked my special friends, Mark and Eric, to tell you why you need speedy delivery on the web.

Don’t miss a single episode of Here’s Why with Mark & Eric. Click the subscribe button below to be notified via email each time a new video is published.

Resources Mentioned

Mark: Eric, you covered “The Need for Speed” session at SMX East. What did you learn?

Eric: Well, Mark, it was an excellent presentation by Fili Wiese, a former member of Google Search Quality team. Right off the bat he shared an amazing statistic to help us understand how important it is for us to deliver web pages quickly.

Mark: And so what was that?

Eric: Well, he gave us a stat from Google that increasing page load time from four-tenths of a second to just nine-tenths of a second decreased traffic and ad revenues by 20%. And Amazon found that for every 100 milliseconds of increased load time that it reduced their sales by 1% for each one.

Mark: Whoa!

Eric: So, yeah, you wouldn’t think it would make that much difference but today’s web user expects fast results. Even a fraction of a second can be too long to wait because they know they can go elsewhere with just a single click.

Even a fraction of a second delay in page load can lose visitors and reduce revenue.Click To Tweet

Mark: So when you combine that with Google’s announcement that they plan to make page speed a direct ranking factor for mobile search, and in fact, they’re already working on that, it’s not hard to understand that we ought to be working harder to improve page load time on our sites. So what are some specific things we can do to make that happen?

Google PageSpeed Insights Tool

Eric: One resource Google provides is their PageSpeed Insights tool. It not only rates the speed of any of your pages with a 0 to 100 score, it also gives you recommendations on how to improve the speed.

Critical Path Rendering

You also should think in terms of critical path rendering.

Mark: Now, what’s that?

Eric: Well, it’s giving priority to your primary content and getting it to load first. A lot of sites, by default, try to load all the code for a page before any content appears. That just looks like a delay to someone trying to view a page on your site. So you want to make sure that your main content loads first and is able to be seen immediately by the visitor. Then load your sidebars and menus and anything below the fold that’s less important to the user later.

#SEO Tip: Use critical path rendering to optimize what loads first from your pages.Click To Tweet

Mark: And you should also optimize your CSS, javascript, and images.

Google AMP

So, Eric, what about Google AMP?

Eric: Well, AMP or Accelerated Mobile Pages is an open-source project sponsored by Google to create a new form of HTML that simplifies and somewhat limits how a page displays in order to enable superfast loading on mobile devices. In addition, if you’re participating in the AMP program, companies such as Google will cache those pages, which actually makes loading the pages go even faster.

Mark: You’re looking now at an actual test we ran on the Google PageSpeed Insights tool.

Google PageSpeed Insights Tool

On the left is the result for our regular page on mobile and on the right, for the AMP version of that same page. As you can see, AMP more than doubled our mobile page load rating, taking us on the unhealthy red to the very happy green range.

Eric: There are other tips for increasing speed for mobile in the article I wrote for Search Engine Land, linked at the top of this page.

Mark: Well, thanks, Eric. Now, I know speed concerns are just one of the mobile-ready initiatives our clients at Stone Temple have been hearing about for some time now. Thanks for keeping us ahead of the wave as you always do.

Don’t miss a single episode of Here’s Why with Mark & Eric. Click the subscribe button below to be notified via email each time a new video is published.