Website Speed Affects SEO

Imagine a scenario of someone who has discovered that their vehicle is not working properly. They think it may be the battery or maybe it is something more serious. As they are not sure where the local auto shop is or who may offer walk in service, they take to googling local auto repair shops on their phones. They click on your website link as it shows your shop is the closest and wait for it to load. Then they wait some more. Frustrated that the website did not load quickly they go back and choose someone else’s link. Gone is the potential client even though you would have been able to help them, and you were the closest one to them. Not only that, Google sees that your website is loading slow and that people are clicking off your site and will bump you down the search list.

Why does this matter?

It matters because the farther down the search result list you are, the less customers you will have. For the most part people find what they are looking for in the first 3 choices and rarely will take the time to research further than that. If your site does not have good search engine optimization (aka SEO), such as website speed, chances are you will keep get bumped down the list.

So why does this happen?

People are in the “now” moment. They want things to happen now, when they want it and they do not want to wait. Statistics show that if a website does not load within 3-4 seconds, they will move to the next one. So, if your website is taking even 6 or 7 seconds to load, chances are people will skip over you. It is even more important to be sure the mobile version of your website loading speed is fast because a lot of people are looking things up on their phone while they are on the go, in the moment. They want answers fast, now, not in several seconds but in mere seconds. If you hire a knowledgeable internet marketing agency this will be one of their first recommendations. The technological age has created the “now” mentality so one has to keep up with it or be left behind.

What can I do?

There are things that you can do to your site to help it to be more optimized and more mobile friendly. It is best to have a web designer help you with this to be sure that it is done properly, or you can hire an SEO professional to help your site even further.

First, you can compress the images on your site and the text. This helps to eliminate any excess bytes that your site may have. Secondly you need to keep the average speed index under 2 seconds, which is how fast the page loads for the users. Lastly, you can minimize the amount of individual content pieces needed, this is known as the request count, to be less than 50. This is important even if you have amazing content on your page and that is what is helping you be high in the rankings. However, it can also cause you losses if you do not make adjustments for mobile users.

Google is constantly changing, and they do not let anyone know if their changes will affect their page directly or not. This is why a lot of companies hire an SEO professional to help them keep their websites at the top. The top means more clicks which turns into more potential customers. It takes a lot of work to boost a website up and to maintain it. If you are in need of help with your website ranking or loading speed, contact Gold Seal SEO to help you. They work with customers across Canada and are more than happy to boost your ranking at reasonable price.