Site Speed Confirmed as a Google Ranking Factor
Yes, it’s been rumored for months, and has now been made official. Google is incorporating site speed as one of the over 200 signals used in determining search rankings.
From the official Google Webmaster Central Blog:
“…we’re including a new signal in our search ranking algorithms: site speed. Site speed reflects how quickly a website responds to web requests.
Speeding up websites is important — not just to site owners, but to all Internet users. Faster sites create happy users and we’ve seen in our internal studies that when a site responds slowly, visitors spend less time there. But faster sites don’t just improve user experience; recent data shows that improving site speed also reduces operating costs. Like us, our users place a lot of value in speed — that’s why we’ve decided to take site speed into account in our search rankings. We use a variety of sources to determine the speed of a site relative to other sites.”
Don’t panic (unless you have serious load time issues – which should be addressed as a usuability issue anyhow), as mentioned this is just one of 200+ ranking factors and there are lots of tools to help you identify ways to improve the speed of your site. The official blog post gives lots of links. But just to highlight a few, Google’s webmaster console provides information very close to the information that Google are using in ranking. In addition, various free-to-use tools offer things like in-depth analysis of individual pages. Google also provides an entire speed-related mini-site with tons of resources and videos about speeding up websites.
A non-google site we have used that provides a lot of useful information is http://www.webpagetest.org. The web page performance tests give you details including a visual waterfall breakdown of page load elements and time for each.
WebPageTest also produces an optimisation checklist that you can work through or pass on to your developer. You can run a web page test on your site here.
5 Top AdWords Landing Page Tips
As I mentioned in my previous post, setting up a successful AdWords ad campaign isn’t as simple as just stuffing a few “relevent” keywords into an adgroup, writing an ad and putting a bid amount on the keywords and turning it all on.
Chances are, if you’ve ever dabbled with AdWords before and done this (as most beginners do), you had a pretty poor result.
Either your ads didn’t show up often, or they didn’t get clicked much, OR (even worse) you got lots of clicks but very few of them turned into a sale or a lead.
So, one of the pieces of the puzzle is the landing page, and I thought I’d make a few comments about them, since we are (once again) designing landing pages for clients who have NO IDEA about how to make this work properly – which is NOT their fault. We’re the adwords specialists, not them, which is why they came to us for help!