Your conversion rate drops by approximately 4.42% for every second a visitor has to wait for your website to load. This means you could have killer keywords and tons of backlinks, but poor web performance could thwart even the best SEO strategy!
Many agencies limit their SEO offerings to common tactics such as on-site optimization, link building, and content strategy. However, website performance is an equally important but less discussed component of SEO. To achieve your SEO goals, it is essential that web development and site maintenance are not isolated from search engine optimization. If you are just starting to work on optimizing your site, you may find it beneficial to completely redesign your website from scratch with SEO in mind (most SEO agencies can help with this). Otherwise, problematic code could clog up your entire SEO strategy.
This article explains how web performance affects SEO, four key tips to improve your site’s performanceand an important caveat about the limits an agency’s ability to help improve your SEO with a pre-built website.
How does site performance affect SEO?
Google uses many factors to rank your website. Each SEO factor is related to a human user’s experience of your site or the search bots’ experience of your site, and Website performance is a key determinant for both humans and algorithms.
For example, a website optimized for fast load times will result in a great user experience. Click-through rate, time spent on site, and bounce rate are all signaling factors for Google’s algorithm, and site performance is also important for each of these elements.
The four key elements to help you achieve stellar web performance
Web performance is affected by many things, but you can achieve good results by focusing your efforts on four key elements: page load time, tracing, safetyi navigation.
Page load time
According to a Google study, more than half of mobile visitors will click if the website takes more than three seconds to load. Half of mobile visitors expect a page to load in less than two seconds.
Google highlighted the importance of page load times with the release of Core Web Vitals. The code behind the site can seriously affect page load times. The solution is to work with an experienced web developer who prioritizes UX.
tracking
In simple terms, crawling is when Google’s search bots crawl (or crawl) your website to rank how easy it is to navigate. Crawling is what your site means to Google.
To help bots navigate successfully (and therefore rank highly), your website needs to provide clear signage, accurate maps, and labels for everything.
There should be no dead ends or orphaned pages. Each page should have internal links that connect it to another page.
If you have a page that offers value through visuals, make sure all photos have appropriate descriptions and videos have transcripts. Although search engines are very intelligent, they still cannot make sense of videos or images without textual context.
security
As part of its ranking criteria, Google wants to know if a site has a secure and encrypted connection. This is nothing new: Google has always preferred secure websites with proper encryption. However, we still come across many law firm websites that do not have HTTPS encryption. This is a major no-no, as many users will receive an automatic security warning before entering a website without HTTPS encryption.
Good security protocols help your website rank higher on the search engine results page.
Navigation
When designing a navigation structure for your website, you need to consider robots and humans. Search engines need a structure to understand how all your content is related. Human visitors need a clear hierarchy to help them find answers to their questions quickly and safely.
Google’s John Mueller recently explained that the preferred architecture is a Structure of the pyramid site. Although the “correct” navigation structure has been the subject of much debate, simple language and clear categories it will serve both humans and robots.
A word of caution: SEO is best done from scratch
You may be reading this article because you need SEO help for your existing website. Unfortunately, we usually can’t help in this situation.
Site architecture and functionality are so critical to your SEO strategy that a pre-built website greatly limits our ability to help you.
Also, if your website has a proprietary system, this can create additional barriers to making the structural changes needed for optimal performance. A better alternative is WordPress, a platform that allows you to make the future of your website and rotate as search engines publish new updates.
In general, the key to SEO is a bottom-up approach. Create a functional website that is optimized for user experience and crawlability. Then layer on things like content strategy and link building.
Review and next steps
Web performance is a critical component of SEO. There are a few key website structural components and performance measures that matter most to search engines:
Page load time Tracking Security Navigation
The most effective SEO strategy is built from the ground up. In other words, SEO should be built into the architecture of your website rather than sprinkled on top as an afterthought.
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