Today, we're going to talk about the effect of site speed on SEO. Why speed is known as an SEO factor today, the truth and the myths about site speed and where you end up ranking. My name is John Locke, and there are a few things that I think that you should know about site speed: what's true, what's false, what's a myth, and what the reality is, just so you have clear expectations.
If any of you have tried to improve your SEO in recent years, you're probably aware of Google Page Speed Insights or GTMetrix, which are tools that you can use to measure your page speed. Google page speed insights gives you a score and gives you a pass/fail for both mobile and desktop. It'll give you a bunch of suggestions.
Now, if you're a web developer, you've been after that holy grail of 100s on site speed for mobile and desktop for your website. One thing to keep in mind: site speed is not a substitution for all the other factors that go into where a particular site or a particular web page is going to rank. It's one factor out of many.
Is it important? I absolutely believe that it is important, and you should optimize for as many factors as you can, optimize for every single thing that you can and make an improvement. Especially if you're a smaller business and not an enterprise or a fortune 500 brand that has a lot of other factors working in your favor.
If you're a small guy or if you have a lot of competition then you should optimize for speed, but don't forget to optimize your content for each particular keyword. You probably have a particular page that keyword is ranking for or you're trying to make it rank better for that, and if not, you should create that content. And not to downplay the importance of links because that is a big factor too.
But today, we're talking about page speed. A common misconception among SEO consultants, and a lot of people that actually work in the web industry, people who build websites for a living, is that if you get a perfect score or a near perfect score in Page Speed Insights, then you should rank higher. SEO is very complicated, and two sites can have very similar factors, and they can get very different results.
Sometimes, it's about having the right combinations of things. But like I said, if you have the right type of content and you have a ton of links coming from industry sites. Then, site speed is only going to help you improve if you're a smaller business.
You will want to improve that. Now, let me just say that it can make some improvement if your site speed is really bad. So, for example, if it takes 10 seconds, 13 seconds to load your page, and then your competitors might take two to four seconds to load a particular page, then you are probably losing users.
People who are searching for your business on Google and they click it, and then it takes a long time to load, those people probably are leaving or they're not finding what they're looking for and they're getting impatient. The thing about the internet, having broadband, having everybody have a mobile device and having so much information at our fingertips is people are really impatient. Attention spans are a lot shorter than maybe they were 20 or 30 years ago, so having a site that loads fast and loads quickly is an important thing.
The big the big reason nobody talks about why Google wants page speed is--there's the obvious reason of course is it's good for the users. Google wants to retain market share and if they push sites that are fast loading, their fast sites to the top, as long as they meet all the other qualifications of getting people to their goal, then that's good for google because that means people keep using google and then people who are frustrated with not being able to rank organically, they can sell them AdWords and then they can make money and everybody's happy. The other reason is it does cost google a lot of money and resources to have Googlebot go and crawl from different locations and gather up all these websites and gather up all these web pages.
And one thing that I've noticed, and I think this changed maybe about a year ago, maybe a little bit less, maybe a little bit longer, but about that time it used to be that sites would get crawled if they were a popular, semi-popular site. They would get crawled maybe once a week, but nowadays it seems like a lot of sites they might get crawled once a month, unless you go into google search console and you actually, you know, inspect the page and then ask Google to re-index that page if it's made, if any changes have been made to that particular page. And I think that google is really trying to save as many resources as possible, because all of that does cost bandwidth, it adds up.
There are more websites now, exponentially more than there were when search engines first started and so more websites being added all the time. It adds up, but yeah it is good for users if your site loads fast. Now I want to reiterate this fact, if you get a hundred in Page Speed Insights, and it loads super-fast, almost instantaneously.
I know that you can arrange different things and do different things with web development to make an average page load in less than three seconds. Sometimes, maybe two and a half seconds or even two seconds or less than that, depending on how many resources you're loading on the page. And if you're deferring images, lazy loading images, using next-gen images like WebP instead of JPEGs or PNGs, which tend to be heavier, and deferring loading asynchronously, all the other components like JavaScript and things like that, then a page can load really fast.
The big thing is making sure that what you're loading is not render-blocking. So, render-blocking is any file or asset that needs to be loaded to the page before the page can render. If that needs to load--so your goal as a web developer is to make sure that anything that can be deferred is deferred.
Anything that the browser must calculate [layout and movement] will also add to the time that it takes you to load a page. Images, make sure that it has a defined height and width, if possible, or the bounding box around that image has a defined width at least. Page Speed Insights will tell you exactly what things, if you open the little comment boxes.
If you run your page through Page Speed Insights, it'll tell you exactly what you need to do. And the other one that we talked about in another video is animations and also some of the things that aren't considered complicated animations, but CSS animations such as changing color or transition times. Those things actually, the browser has to calculate where they're going to end up.
These can contribute to the page shift, the Content Layout Shift, that you might see as one of the metrics that is being measured in Page Speed Insights. Making sure that the browser must do as little work as possible to calculate where everything is going to go, this is one of the major factors in making your page speed fast. Okay, so a big question, if you focus only on improving your page speed.
Let's say that you don't do any work on the content or links or the design of the site, that's a SEO factor too. But if you only work on the page speed, how much can you stand to improve your SEO? It depends on the competition.
It depends like what your competitors have on their pages. If everybody's site is not that great, the content isn't that great, it can make a difference. But if everybody has the right type of content for that particular search on their page already, or your competition has a really strong brand where they have a lot of links from other industry websites or other authoritative websites, then you will need to do more than simply improve the page speed.
But you should do it anyway, it's the right thing to do for your customers, for users, for a search engine. Anything that you can do to improve is good. Let's say that you are in fierce competition, and you've dialed in all the things like content, links, design, and you're working on the page speed, it can make an improvement.
I'm not saying you'll jump one spot or two spots or five spots or ten if you do this, but do keep your expectations in a reasonable range of what's going to happen. The most important thing that you must keep in mind with managing expectations is Google wants to see that your site is faster than your competitors. It doesn't need to be “one hundred” across the board in Page Speed Insights, it doesn't need to load in like .
1 seconds, but it does need to be faster than your competition. So if your competitors are slower loading, that can be an advantage for you and Google will test with user data, because it does out quite often, sites that have comparable content and links, it will push different results to get some user data on all of those pages and see what the users, how they respond to different pages, and use that data to make a determination on what sites should stay at the top and which should be shuffled down the ranks. All right, if you have a question about page speed then put it down in the comments below and I would be happy to answer that.
If you are getting value from this video or other videos on this channel, I'd encourage you to give this a thumb up and subscribe. All right, that's all I have for now. My name is John Locke.
My business is “Lockedown SEO” and I'll be back again in about a week with another video. Until next time, peace.
