The Website Performance Metrics That Affect SEO

You’re ready to boost your site’s SEO. You know that your website performance metrics affect search rankings. But which metrics should you look at and why?

You know that your website performance metrics affect search rankings. But which metrics should you look at and why?

Turns out, user experience is key. Google places a ton of emphasis on user experience (UX) when ranking websites, and so should you.

User experience may be subjective, but there are ways to measure whether your site is pleasing to the average user. Some website performance metrics are good indicators of user experience, and hence, your site’s SEO.

Here are the website performance metrics to focus on for SEO.

Speed Things Up

For SEO, the tortoise certainly does not beat the hare.

Did you know that 40% of users will abandon your web page if it takes longer than three seconds to load? That makes speeding up your website and monitoring its status a good investment to make.

And making your site faster for users will pay off for SEO. Google uses page speed to rank web pages, especially for their mobile rankings.

In addition, if your website loads slowly, this will also negatively affect other metrics like your conversion rates, the time spent on the website, and your bounce rate.

Bounce Rate

In general, the lower the page speed, the higher the bounce rate. A page’s bounce rate is the rate at which users click off of the page as soon as they click on.

If your site is slow or down, your bounce rates will be high. Also, if users click on your site and don’t like what they see, then they will click off.

Google uses bounce rates to decide how to rank your page, so you want your bounce rate to be as low as possible. A good website will keep users reading and have a high time spent.

Time Spent

Like bounce rates, the time spent metric tells you if users are spending a significant amount of time browsing through your site.

A bounce rate will indicate if a user saw your site, realized they weren’t interested and clicked off. Time spent is a better indicator of whether your users are reading the content of your website and clicking through the pages.

Other metrics can help you look at what people are clicking on when they spend time on your site. In order to meet your website’s goals, though, you need to look at conversion rates.

Conversion Rates

Conversion rates may be most important when it comes to your site’s performance metrics. It tells you how successful your website is at doing what you want it to do.

If you want users to make a purchase, then the conversion rate will show you how often visitors make a purchase on your site. This can also work for signing up for newsletters or other success indicators.

Conversion rates and SEO are buddies. When you have a high conversion rate, it’s good for your SEO, and when you have good SEO, your conversion rates will be higher.

Of course, none of this will matter if you don’t focus on getting mobile.

Getting Mobile

You may have heard that mobile internet use has surpassed other devices. This means if you’re not making sure your site is friendly for all devices, then you’re missing out on some quality traffic.

Not going mobile will also affect your SEO. Google has stated that mobile optimization is extremely important for ranking your site.

Since so much of internet usage is on mobile devices, having a non-mobile-friendly site will negatively affect the above metrics.

You can tell how your site is doing specifically on mobile devices by looking at your mobile-specific metrics.

How to Improve Your Website Performance Metrics

How can you improve these metrics? Having a good web design and strategy is a win-win: it will make your customers happy, and in doing so, it will boost your SEO.

Optimize your site for SEO by making it more user-friendly. Up the page speed, make your site pretty, and make it easy to read.

Make sure your site is mobile-friendly. Focus on web design, including innovative designs that will make your site pop.

You should also have an easy way to know if your site is down so these metrics aren’t affected by web failure. Sign up for our plans so you’re never in the dark about your website’s status.