User Experience Matters
So, let’s dive into your website speed and how it hurts your user numbers. The last time that you did an internet search it’s likely that you clicked off of a site that didn’t load properly for you. We all do it; we’re more interested in getting our information NOW than waiting thirty more seconds it would take for a site to load. Users bounce from a website and test another one to see if that one is faster, and they create opinions on a business based on whether their website is fast enough. The user experience for your website really does matter, and long load times will increase the risk that your users won’t stick around. Website design has improved massively over the last few years with the inclusion of GIFs, videos and superior images, but this has the downside of longer load times. While your website will look pretty, it will take longer to load and your efforts can lead to a high bounce rate. Of course, faster is always going to be better when loading your site but that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t use great imagery!
Website Speed & SEO – A Marriage!
When you are considering your SEO Auckland strategy, you need to consider the fact that your website speed and your SEO are a perfect marriage. If your website page loads slowly, it won’t show up at the top of the search engine results pages. The Google algorithms rely on page load times as a key ranking factor, which just goes to prove that website speed and SEO are linked. Google – plus other search engines – are all looking to promote the websites that offer the best user experience. Any website pages that are slow frustrate users, and this impacts the way in which your website ranks. Asking your SEO agency to build your SEO strategy around providing users with the information that you need is important. You can only do this, however, when you understand how to meet their search intent, and if you aren’t paying too much attention to this your users will lose patience and bounce away!
Page Speed & SEO – What’s The Impact?
We know that page speed will help you to rank for Google, but it’s important to note that this applies to your mobile site and your desktop site. When it comes to delivering SEO alongside that, improving your site speed will be the most effective thing that you can do to improve your SEO search rankings. The right SEO agency will factor this into your user experience and web design goals during the development of your website, but you can also come back to it later. Did you know that smartphone usage is responsible for much of the worldwide traffic on the web? The only issue is that you will find that these also have the slowest web connections.
Smartphones have to capture the 4G/5G signals or the Wi-Fi wherever they are, so you need to ensure that your website is properly optimised for smartphone usage. If you aren’t careful, the site can lag on those portable devices causing your rankings to drop once again.
Ignoring page load times is not a good idea and a reputable SEO agency won’t ignore them, either! When you spend time ensuring that your SEO strategy is perfect, the last thing that you want to happen is for this to be for nothing. Slow page loading times will interrupt that carefully planned SEO strategy and as you now know, your users aren’t going to be the most patient!
Making That First Impression
If you want to ensure that your business website makes a good impression on your audience, you need to consider what happens once your page does load. While it’s important to ensure that your page load times are short and sweet, you need to think about whether your website is outdated or not. You want your site speeds to be fast, but if the resulting website is cluttered, out of date and boring, there’s no point! Everything on your homepage should set up your business to tell your users what it is you do and it should be ordered in a way that doesn’t slow your site. You need to have imagery, but the last thing that you want to have is cluttered pictures that will slow the site down.
The whole idea of your website is to convince those who are interested to convert to a customer. With the help of the right SEO agency, you’re going to be able to convert website users to new customers. A successful brand website depends on its speed and if you think that your website is lagging behind, our SEO agency can help! There’s no use in having a website that isn’t quick enough and it’s time to review your website performance if you believe that there is a slowdown. Contact us today to speed your site and build your conversions.