Your Website Speed Is Critical To Google’s Latest Update
As of July 9th, 2018, website speed is now a major ranking factor for mobile search results.
Your website speed (how long it takes for your website to load fully) has always been a factor in determining where your website will rank. This counts for both organic search result rankings, as well as for your Adwords Quality Score. This means that if you have customers visiting your website on their phone or tablet, you need to ensure a speedy page load.
This means that every single business with a website needs to keep website speed in mind from now on. We know that some businesses do more of their work in person or on the desktop, but you don’t want to isolate your mobile traffic! Ensuring a quick website speed is beneficial for mobile and desktop users alike.
How Does This Work?
As you probably know, Google has an algorithm to figure out how to place your website link in their Search Engine Results Page (SERP). According to Google “speed has been used in ranking for some time, that signal was focused on desktop searches…Starting in July 2018, page speed will be a ranking factor for mobile searches.” This basically means that if you and several other websites are delivering the same relevant content to a users search, how quickly the page loads will be a determining factor for where your search shows up in Google’s output.
Let’s say your law firm and three other local law firms all have blog posts related to why your customer needs a great liability lawyer. If your content is all equally relevant and other ranking factors (like SEO) being the same, how quickly that page loads can push you up or down on the Google results page. Because most people only look at the top few SERP links, you want to be as high up on that list as possible.
Keeping It Local
Google’s Mobile Moments Study shows that 40% of mobile searches are related to local listings. Making sure that your website speed is working in your favor is even more important for local and small businesses!
How Do I Find Out My Mobile Website Speed?
Google has their own tool for figuring out website speed. Their website, TestMySite works by showing you where your website ranks in comparison to others in your industry, as well as generating a report to see where you can improve.
Google’s main goal is to show you where you may be losing out on customers due to visitor loss. By visitor loss, Google means that when a website loads too slowly, visitors will get frustrated and leave. This means you’re losing out on growing your relationship with a user due to your slow website speed.
Ideally, you’ll want to be speedier than your competition so you’re experiencing low visitor loss.
Another tool that can be used is GTMetrix. Because no admin access is necessary, you can easily compare your site to that of your competition, giving you more insight into how your site is doing.
If you’re focusing instead on SEO in order to be more competitive, you can switch your mobile pages to an Accelerated Mobile Page (AMP). AMPs strip your HTML code of unnecessary or unwanted clutter in order to improve page speed, which Google says can be anywhere from 15 to 85 percent (!!!).
What About Paid Ads?
For those of using Google Ads, you’re going to want to make sure your landing page has the most seamless experience. This is part of what Google’s Quality Score Algorithms use when deciding how much you’ll have to pay per click in order to serve your ads on their search network. The Quality Score Algorithm is based off several ranking factors including content relevance, trustworthiness, easy navigation, and quick load time. If your keywords ever get the notification that they have a low quality score, you need to make some updates to the page including the website speed.
Super speedy websites are kind of our jam. Worried about your website speed? Let’s chat about it in a free strategy session.