Website speed has been an important aspect of SEO for years now.
Way back at the beginning of the decade, in 2010, Google released a public statement regarding website speed and their algorithm. Website speed, or the response time a site has to web requests, would become an important part of how the search engine prioritized results.
This is still true of Google and all other major web search engines today. Speed is an integral and essential part of building good SEO. A failure to prioritize it can lead to your site falling into search engine oblivion.
Read on, and we’ll further discuss the importance that fast loading times can have on your blog’s SEO.
Search engines want the best for their users. If web browsers and consumers have a good experience using Google to search for things online, they’ll continue to come back to the site.
It’s of the highest priority, then, that Google directs its customer base to websites that ensure the best possible user experience. Website speed is a big part of that. Slow websites frustrate web users, and consumers have increasingly less patience with wait times as technology continues to advance and grow.
SEO oftentimes is focused on pleasing bots and algorithms, but creating a genuinely pleasant user experience can be just as important.
Slow loading pages frequently result in low user engagement. This low engagement usually arises in the form of decreased time per page and highly increased bounce rates.
Google takes these user statistics seriously. So an increase in bounce rates from users could drastically alter where Google places said site in their overall rankings. Meanwhile, sites that have high user engagement are being pushed higher and higher in contrast.
Outside of user stats, indexation also has direct ties to site speed. When Googlebot crawls sites for information and indexing, it loses efficiency as it hits slow loading sites. Rankings associated with the keywords of the slow pages can quickly suffer as a result.
There are a number of resources available online designed to test your website’s speed. These resources often typically can help you trace and fix problems if need be.
Google’s page speed tester is one of the easiest and most obvious to use. It’s as simple as inputting the URL of your site. Another incredibly popular choice is WebPageTest.org. It’s one of the most widely used services for a reason, as it allows specific tests from multiple locations, browser types, connections, and devices all at once.
If you’re having trouble managing website time as it relates to your SEO, you can also look to professional help. There’s a number of amazing services, like this Jacksonville SEO company, who aim to help blog writers speed their websites up and increase general optimization across the board.
The importance of website speed when it comes to SEO cannot be understated. Ensuring that you have a fast loading blog will help endear you to both web users and search engines at large, and you can do it today.
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