How Your Website Page Speed Affects SEO & Google Rankings

By Sarah Giometti | Local SEO

Oct 14
How Your Website Page Speed Affects SEO & Google Rankings

Website speed is one of the most important factors site owners need to worry about, not just in terms of what Google and other search engines think. Just a 1-second delay can reduce page views by 11% as consumers expect the website they visit to offer a seamless loading experience.

And because consumers care a great deal about website speed, so do search engines like Google. They even consider it a ranking factor when deciding the order of the pages in the SERPs.

But how much does speed affect your SEO and Google rankings?

Why Google Cares So Much about Your Website Speed

It all has to do with user experience. When a person searches for something on Google, there is an existing understanding that the results Google shows meet some high quality criteria. The pages are relevant to the user query and the site is secure, reputable even.

This confidence comes directly from the confidence users have in Google. If you think about it, the search engine wouldn’t be the go-to research tool online if their results were filled with low-quality and irrelevant pages, would it?

So because Google wants their users to have a seamless online experience using their products, they also pay attention to the experience someone can have on the sites in the SERP. and Page speed is a definitive mark of potentially great (or bad) user experience.

Of course, site speed is not the only ranking factor Google and other search engines care about, but it is a great place to start if you’re looking to revamp your SEO strategy.

How to Build a Winning SEO Strategy

SEO is a complex process of improving a website in an effort to improve its ranking in the search results. Focusing on just one element of SEO like website speed is not a good solution because we don’t know how much website speed ultimately matters in the Google algorithm.

But we do know that a comprehensive SEO strategy helps improve rankings and even gives your consumers a much better experience navigating your site. This includes lowering page speed and many other efforts such as:

  • Improving navigation and site structure
  • Optimizing page layout
  • Focusing on site accessibility (such as making it mobile-friendly, responsive, etc.)
  • Having a good content marketing strategy
  • Building backlinks

These efforts can be a lot for businesses to manage, but a good place to start is with the current state of your site. An SEO audit can help you discover any issues with your current efforts and set priorities to first address in your new SEO strategy.

Provaro Marketing Can Help

If you need to improve site speed and your SEO strategy, the team at Provaro Marketing is happy to help.

Use our free local SEO audit tool to see the current state of your site’s SEO and give us a call at 707-595-7002 or contact us online today to learn more about how SEO can help your local business.

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What To Do If Your Business Is Not Showing Up On Google

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