You’ve realized that your visibility as a company will benefit from SEO expertise, which includes technical SEO. Most companies don’t have in-depth experience or knowledge of technical SEO, which is one reason why they turn to a professional marketing and SEO consultancy to improve their position. It’s more than that, of course, and getting professional SEO and marketing advice helps you join all the dots for maximum results.
When you dive into the details of your website and page ranking and look for systematic ways to become more visible to search engines and to potential customers, there is the aforementioned technical SEO, that is, optimizing your website’s technical elements to ensure that search engines can crawl and index your pages correctly. Examples of these tactics include hosting decisions, page sitemaps, optimized error pages, correct redirects, SSL/TLS page encryption (i.e., HTTP versus HTTPS), optimized mobile rendering, overall site performance, and page load speed. These technical nuts and bolts are just as important as the non-technical aspects of SEO.
While non-technical SEO and some parts of technical SEO can be managed by SEO specialists, some aspects of web performance and its optimization fall under mitigation techniques handled by IT teams. The SEO gains you can win (or lose) based on web performance are one reason for breaking down inter-departmental silos and sharing marketing goals more broadly within companies.
Does web performance affect SEO?
Web performance may be a hidden factor for most marketers, but it has a profound and immediate impact on user experience, and also on SEO ranking.
Direct SEO influence
Page load speed (the time it takes for a page to render) and time to first byte are signals that directly feed into a site’s ranking.
Indirect SEO influence
These speed rankings also affect SEO indirectly; longer load times can increase the bounce rate, reduce the amount of time a user stays on-site, and ultimately depress conversion rates. Why stick around for a slow experience when there are plenty of other competing sites? It becomes clear to see that page speed is immediately important to user experience, and without page ranking visibility, you won’t get users on your site to have any kind of experience in the first place.
Web performance speed considerations
What are the best practices you should consider to ensure page load speed and other web performance metrics? Here are some key examples.
- Reverse proxy web caching: Caching content, that is, making copies of content closer to the end-user, means that it is delivered faster upon each request because the content doesn’t have to be fetched from the backend. You can control the time-to-live for cached content so that you’re delivering from cache as long as you need to. There’s no reason to update the cache unless the content is changing/dynamic. This saves considerable time and creates lightning-fast page delivery. You want to get as much site traffic to hit your cache rather than making a roundtrip to and from the backend.
- Server optimization: Server response time can, in part, be alleviated and improved with good caching policies. But there are other factors that makeup server behavior and performance. This can include the amount of traffic at any given time (you could be flooded, in which case you could make use of an origin shield), how heavy some pages are in terms of resource use, slow routing, or slow database queries.
- File compression: Files can get out of hand and take time to load. This is one hiccup that is easy to fix but also easy to forget.
- Rethink content distribution: If you’re not already using a content distribution network (CDN), this might be an effective way to ensure that you have copies of your site in geographically dispersed data centers, closer to your users. CDNs are essentially a collection of caches — they make content delivery faster and more reliable, thus adding a level of performance protection.
Healthy SEO with healthy web performance
Have you started implementing page speed and web performance measures to help build awareness and increase your organic search web traffic? Tune in to the performance metrics to find out how to improve your customers’ on-site experience.
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