SEO is hard. Especially as a newbie. I am going on a journey of trying to figure out how it functions and what makes a difference to your organic search results. This first lesson is all about site performance and speed. Why it’s important and how to gauge it, and how to figure out what changes to make in order to positively impact the performance of any given site.

Introduction

Hi! You don’t know me on this blog yet, but I am Zane and I am a beginner in SEO. Here at Take Some Risk, I do all sorts of things be it research or data collection, editing of other blog posts, etc. One day, however, Mr. Boss Man decides that I am going to learn SEO, and I am thinking, “Great! I would love to tack on some new skill to my arsenal!” What I wasn’t aware of was how an inexact science it really is. I understood that the goal was to climb further up the organic search results totem pole and that some of what impacts that are keywords within a given page. So now I am on a journey to figure out and decipher what else can help a website clamour their way to the top of search reseults.

Most recently, I was asked to do a fairly rudimentary SEO audit for one of our clients, which was really eye opening. I want to point out that there are a lot of SEO resources out there, who are truly experts on the subject. This isn’t that. This is me trying to help the people on the bottom, and maybe offer insights into things that I didn’t really consider before doing this audit.

Site Peformance is Important?

As per the title, site performance is actually a key indicator for Google and search engines, which honestly, surprised me somewhat. Why would how fast your site loads effect whether or not your site shows up on organic results? The answer is because Google is trying to give the best user experience they can, which is directly related to the experience the user has of the website provided to them. User experience is at the crux of all decisions, really, and is one of Google’s key ranking factors.

That being said, above just straight search related results, the better the user experience, the longer people will stay on your site, which can lead to a greater number of conversions. Slow loading speeds can also increase the CPC of ads beause people might just bounce right off if the page doesn’t load fast enough, and not convert. So like, overall, of high importance for any company or business or even just general website looking to improve their overall search status.

How to Rate and Determine Site Speed

There are a number of different websites and tools that can help to determine site speed and can identify. For my audit I used almost exclusively Google’s Page Insights. It broke down exactly what the struggles were and gives you a mark out of 100 for both desktop and mobile. All for free! It allowed me to articulate and explain exactly what the client might need to do in order to improve the performance of their site. There are other resources that function similarly as well. Pingdom was something I came across during my research, but from what I gathered, Google’s offering was best for my needs.

I ran a random website to give you an example and have edited out the website preview just to keep things a little more anonymous, but it normally displays the page you ran. You can see you can switch from the desktop to the mobile version at any time and looks the same.

A breakdown of a Google's Page Speed Insights report detailing thee perforamnce of a specific website.

Just below it exists the opportunities which approximates how much time you’ll save in loading time and the other diagnostics.

The second part of Google's Page Insights, It breaks down the opportunities and diagnostic issues that contribue to poor page speed.

Google’s Search Console also offers some insights. It can help identify which pages have issues, and which other pages are expected to share similar issues based on the same template being used or content management system (like WordPress).

This part of the audit is relatively easy. I am not qualified to make further insights about how this might truly offer better rankings or understand which of the fixes Google Page Insights suggestions is going to truly be the game changer (if any). What I can say though, is that it is important and that to do it right, you need to be thorough.

Final Insights For the Beginners

Okay, so this part is really where I examine my oversights and things that I have learned through the process. People with more experience probably have an understanding of the importance of these things, so these are for the people in similar positions to avoid making my mistakes.

I will say that I originally only ran the home page (using Page Insights), got the results, included them in my audit and thought I was pretty good to go, but a home page is not the whole site. So I took a sampling of collection pages and product pages, ran 3 of each and found the common issues and suggested that those be fixed. I really hadn’t considered beyond the home page, so I definitely recommend you thinking beyond what’s in front of you and trying to understand a website as a whole unit vs just the home page.

Another thing I hadn’t really considered was the mobile diagnostics. I mentioned the overall score (once again, of the home page) which was EXCEPTIONALLY poor, but didn’t dig deeper. What I needed to realize was that the value of a mobile site differs per business. In this specific case, mobile was responsible for 60% of their overall conversions, making it arguably more valuable than their desktop website. Including the shortcomings in detail and truly helping the client identify what might have previously been an oversight.

You really have to contextualize everything. Why are you looking at a metric? What does that metric mean? How does this benefit the client to know, and how can you explain it to them in a way that makes it digestible, understandible, and actionable? Keep these questions in mind when offering information.

Questions, Comments, Concerns?

Any level of interaction on this post would be extremely apprecaited. I want to know what you think and feel about the topic. I would love to know what else you would like to read about in regards to SEO and how I might be able to try to learn the thing to give you, the people, some insights that you wouldn’t have considered being similarly new to the topic. Anything helps and I look forward to going on this mission together.