In 2018, the speed of your site was more crucial than ever before. We cannot stress enough how a fantastic metric adds to the quality of your digital marketing solutions and online presence. Mainly it has a massive influence on SEO rankings on desktops and mobile (mainly due to Google’s mobile-first index) as well as paid advertisements on Google as well as its impact on quality score, and, more importantly, the general customer experience and conversion.
In the final analysis, websites with slow speeds will have a lower percentage of conversions and an excessive bounce rate, and a small number of web pages per visitor. In essence, a slow website can cause people to abandon the site since no one has the patience to wait around for the website to load. This is particularly true for businesses with an extensive conversion funnel on their website. There will always be a drop-off when the conversion funnel comprises several steps and pages; still, when you have a slow-performing website and users trying to go through a more complicated conversion funnel, the drop-off intensifies.
Let’s look at the impact of the site speed on several digital channels.
Site Speed’s Impact on SEO
The speed of your site is a ranking factor and is a much higher ranking factor for mobile devices. Google is launching a Mobile First index moving forward that will go into effect in July 2018, which means now is the perfect time to improve mobile speed to ensure you don’t end up in the wrong team when it is officially released. That being said, we’ve already witnessed the impact speed can have on the sites of our client’s SEO rankings and organic traffic.
The speed of a website is considered a ranking factor because it is, in the first place, an indicator of a high-quality user experience. A speedy site can result in a better user experience, whereas an unresponsive site can result in a bad user experience. The average user stays on a website longer when the speed is more significant, and they convert more efficiently and bounce less. This is why Google has included it as an element of ranking.
We’ve experienced the impact of this directly with one of our clients. We introduced site speed optimizations on their website, and the developer did not realize the work we’d completed. The site with the speed optimizations went from having a four-second load time to a 12-second loading time once the optimized features were removed and caused rankings to fall. We re-entered and updated the website with the correct speed optimizations and brought the site back to a 4-second load time, and the orders returned up.
This shows in real time how the speed of your site is directly connected with your SEO-related marketing plan and your keyword rankings. This is not common, considering that most things happen in real-time for SEO, and it’s the slow and steady win of the race. However, we observed the effect on ranking in a matter of days after optimizations for speed were taken off and implemented. This was a fantastic test because we had already known that the rate of websites had an impression on SEO, but this revealed the importance Google puts on the mobile and desktop versions of it from a search standpoint.
The effects of speedy websites on user experience affect other channels of digital media, such as paid search.
Site Speed’s Impact on Paid Search
Regarding PPC and website speed, It comes down to the most affordable and affordable price for your bidding on keywords, which depends on the quality score. In the case of paid media, the quality score is essentially how pertinent Google discovers your website’s page’s landing page about a particular search term. It evaluates the user experience of being directed to your website by a specific search term. A slow loading speed can be perceived by Google as a lousy user experience con, consequently lowering the quality score.
Quality score measures how much you’ll be charged (cost per click, also known as CPC) and the average place within your SERP (Search Engine Results Page). When you’ve got a poor quality score and speed of your site, it isn’t easy to rank within the two top spots on the SERP. Also, depending on how popular the keywords are, it could be that you do not be able to appear at the top of the list. If you have a insufficient quality score, your advertisements will not appear at all. The quality score has a significant influence on PPC.
As with every other source of traffic to your site with a slow loading time, conversion rates will be lower, and bounce rate will increase, two things you wouldn’t wish to see when trying to increase leads or sales.
The qualitative score should be considered the primary measurement you need to look at when using PPC to ensure your advertisements are running optimally. If you have a higher high-quality score, you’ll have an increase in your advertising position and a lower price per click. If your site is faster, it’s possible that you’ll score better and you’ll pay less and also rank higher.
