In this post, I help to calm you all down, as well as revert from the path of what I call "fanatic SEO work", that quite opposite of "fantastic SEO work", ends up hurting "SEO" more than helping it.
How "fanatic SEO" is against "fantastic SEO" work?
This explanation is a bit difficult to understand, so stay with me here. Fanatics take “everything unnecessarily” to the extreme.
If you are a fitness fanatic, there is a good chance you end up hurting your own body. If you are a health fanatic, you perhaps taking excessive medication which may neutralize bacteria, but in return damaging your immune system.
In SEO, fanatics mostly focus on imaginary problems, chasing and ending up with ugly situations - spending all their time optimizing except for creating fabulous content and market it with responsibility.
What loading time is the best loading time?
When optimizing, you in reality should set your target speed and performance for your website. Google’s reference is to check the competition and make sure you don’t fall short.
Key is monitoring the "page timings" and "user timings" reports in Google Analytics alongside “speed suggestions”. In general, the home page has to load in 2 seconds, product pages (for e-commerce sites) in 2.5 seconds and all other pages in 3 seconds is a considerably good target to follow.
Many recommend a fully developed homepage should load with content (both text and multimedia) in 3 seconds or less. Regarding HTTP requests, they suggest completing requests under 60 requests.
How design and content affect speed?
For speed and performance, starting out with a simple page layout is a good idea. Do not much stress on UX things now. Keep in mind that UX is important and has to consider when you laying out content and designing a page. But focusing on simplicity means you are already taking care of it to great extent.
All you need to place the content in their proper position and shapes.
Even if you have to deviate from your original page layout, you could always perform the speed test of the same template’s content with tools.
What I do is test the speed of a page’s variations in the Google tool to see which version has the best performance. Before finalizing anything, I would like to have a quick comparison to allow me to do the changes.
You can check "crawl stats" in the Search Console to validate your changes on page load time. In a chart format, Google gives webmasters some data to get an idea of how much time search crawlers are spending download a page in milliseconds which is a very good indicator for the overall measurement of speed and performance of the site.
A case study -
As an SEO I might not have set the world alight, but this case study is still a significant lesson for me.
This is a story of a digital marketing agency and one of their big clients.
Once a business owner was looking for a digital marketing service provider to digitize his brand. So he interviewed an agency.
The agency was capitalizing on the weakest point, and from the start of the interview - the client’s limited knowledge about SEO.
It was definitely a positive move for the agency owner, who ultimately won the project against difficult opponents - and when there is a commercial aspect involved.
This is digital marketing, and we are an agency - this is how we convince clients.
After the contract signed, the business owner was sure that the agency is capable of what he is looking after, and they certainly a good selection.
Yes, they started with a website audit report and claimed the website has SEO issues, but what was important was the way they went after "page load time" right from the off.
They were outstanding in the early stages of diagnosing issues and the client was happy at the way they came out and took control of the SEO operation.
There was a fantastic atmosphere everywhere and it was very exciting to watch the SEO progress the first 20 or 25 days but, when they presented their first monthly SEO progress report card, the client realized there is nothing to quantify.
Agency responds to being given responsibility -
Things were a lot worse for all stakeholders when the agency repeatedly pinpointed the issue with page load time behind no conversions.
Sure, the web design and development team had a lapse right at the slow page loading issue.
That was down to the organization and discipline of the stakeholders that one could call upon, and how hard they worked together as a unit when they did not have an understanding of SEO.
That's not surprising, because the agency owner knew from experience that most clients are interested in either conversions or keywords rank, and if any question arises, page load time issue will be an escape route.
The agency still got to lose the project despite pressed everyone badly for improving page load time every month through their reports. Because the agency’s own website also with very poor load time. And a website’s page speed isn’t the reason to hit the first page automatically.
It's pretty simple: the faster the page loads of your website, the happier your visitors will be. Optimizing page load time leads to obvious developments in reducing bounces means positive customer experience, conversion rates, and in the end, your ROI. But that doesn’t mean you should focus solely on improving speed all the time.
Final thoughts
This is digital marketing, and we are an agency - this is how we convince clients.
After the contract signed, the business owner was sure that the agency is capable of what he is looking after, and they certainly a good selection.
Yes, they started with a website audit report and claimed the website has SEO issues, but what was important was the way they went after "page load time" right from the off.
They were outstanding in the early stages of diagnosing issues and the client was happy at the way they came out and took control of the SEO operation.
There was a fantastic atmosphere everywhere and it was very exciting to watch the SEO progress the first 20 or 25 days but, when they presented their first monthly SEO progress report card, the client realized there is nothing to quantify.
Agency responds to being given responsibility -
Things were a lot worse for all stakeholders when the agency repeatedly pinpointed the issue with page load time behind no conversions.
Sure, the web design and development team had a lapse right at the slow page loading issue.
That was down to the organization and discipline of the stakeholders that one could call upon, and how hard they worked together as a unit when they did not have an understanding of SEO.
That's not surprising, because the agency owner knew from experience that most clients are interested in either conversions or keywords rank, and if any question arises, page load time issue will be an escape route.
The agency still got to lose the project despite pressed everyone badly for improving page load time every month through their reports. Because the agency’s own website also with very poor load time. And a website’s page speed isn’t the reason to hit the first page automatically.
It's pretty simple: the faster the page loads of your website, the happier your visitors will be. Optimizing page load time leads to obvious developments in reducing bounces means positive customer experience, conversion rates, and in the end, your ROI. But that doesn’t mean you should focus solely on improving speed all the time.
Final thoughts
I can list many steps on how to reduce or control the page load time for SEO advantages but that’s not in the scope of today’s post. Keep in mind, if you want to do less coding, make landing page changes faster, more ease when educating your clients how to edit & update their site, creating more engaging conversion driving pages, then avoid a fanatic mindset.
We all webmasters know that SEO is a continuous process. So focusing only on improving the speed at every cost will do more harm than good. You can of course take into consideration the use of CDN, caching plugins, faster yet reliable hosting services, improve your mobile experience with AMP, etc. to get pages load as fast as possible, and still enjoy the UX parameters and better conversions.
If this post on improving your mindset and how it pertains to your SEO work was helpful, feel free to comment below.
If this post on improving your mindset and how it pertains to your SEO work was helpful, feel free to comment below.
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