To put it simply, page speed, or how quickly your landing page loads can impact your Google rankings.

The faster your landing page is, the better your chances are of ranking highly against your competitors. Of course, there are plenty of other factors that can affect your Google rankings such as backlinks, web copy, website safety, mobile-friendliness and technical SEO but page speed should never be overlooked. If one of the crucial SEO ranking factors is ignored, you can expect the overall SEO of your website to suffer.

When it comes to loading up web pages, the old saying of good things come to those that wait, certainly isn’t true.

When a web or a mobile user wants an answer to a question or a solution to the problem, you don’t need a psychology degree to know that they are going to want it immediately.

If people load up your website and get put off by the slow pagespeed, Google’s SEO algorithm will know about it and will start directing visitors to your competitor’s pages instead. From the moment a web user lands on your URL from the SEO listings, Google starts to monitor every click.

How Page speed Insights Work

Time is of the essence for real users exploring your website. If they experience lag and delays while trying to navigate your website, they’re likely to abandon your page completely and look elsewhere.

Recent Google analytics have proven that If your mobile page takes over three seconds to load, 50% of people will look elsewhere instead. The rate isn’t much lower for web users either. This is why more businesses should take advantage of Google’s new speed initiatives that were developed to improve people’s user experience when browsing the web. Their recommendations included paying attention to user-centric performance metrics, this can be done by using Page Speed Insights or new tools such as Lighthouse.

How to Improve your Page Speed

There are many reasons why your page speed may be lower than the recommended speed. The two biggest factors are the images you use on your site and the excessive use of JavaScript. However, there is no one size fits all answer for optimising Page Speed, insight tools must be used to check what is hindering the performance of your website. To make things simpler, the tools will also recommend actions to take to improve the speed of the pages on your website. However, you will need to bear in mind that this isn’t a fool-proof guide. 

1. Evaluate Your Performance Speed Using Page Speed Insights

As a developer, or when looking for a developer for your website, you will need someone that knows how to evaluate performance using speed tools and make the improvements necessary to cut your loading time.

Evaluations will take note of the field data for your website and provide optimisation suggestions, taking into account common problems for slow websites.

2. Use Lab Tools to Boost Your Page Speed

Lab tools such as Lighthouse are automated tools to improve the speed and quality of websites. It can be used on any kind of webpage, including ones that require authentication. It runs many things through its performance audits, such as progressive web apps, accessibility and SEO.

3. Know What You Are Up Against

As with everything in SEO, it pays to outshine the competition. Look how your website performs in comparison to similar websites. Each website has its own speed score; with 1 being the lowest score and 10 being the highest. The score is based on a number of factors, such as the correlation between conversion rates and page speed. To measure your score against others, you can use tools, such as the Speed Scorecard, which will give you an idea of how much work needs to be done on your website.

4. Implement Parallel Tracking

In October 2018, parallel tracking became mandatory for all Google Ad accounts. This new innovation helps pages to load faster with the aim of reducing the number of lost visits. The data used by Parallel Tracking looks at the customer’s journey from your ad to your URL and even measures the clicks on your page. The service is available to all businesses, taking full advantage of it is highly recommended.  The more data you collect about your audience and their journey, the better you are able to teak areas that need fixing, answer their needs and increase site visits and overall sales.

5. Use Impact Calculators

When it comes to looking at page speeds, it was hard to see exactly how they correlate to conversions on your website, that was until the impact calculator was created. The clever and handy tool can estimate the revenue impact that poor page speeds can have on your revenue. It will even show you how much you can gain by investing in your webpage speeds.

6. Never Stop Optimizing

Just as you keep on top of your taxes as a business, your Google rankings must be consistently monitored to make sure that your website is as fast and effective in leading to conversions as possible.

Your SEO plan should revolve around three routine steps: analyse, optimise, and monitor. 

By routinely repeating this process, you can benefit from higher user engagement, more conversions on your website and a better return on investment. The time and money invested in your PageSpeeds and SEO could just give you a competitive edge over your competition.

Increase Your Page Speed with SEO Plans Gold Coast

If you would rather leave the optimization of your page speed up to the professionals and increase your ROI in the process, SEO Plans Gold Coast offers affordable and effective packages to boost your Page Speed and SEO.

Collectively, we have decades of experience in SEO Gold Coast optimisation; we serve local Gold Cost businesses as well as national and international companies looking to boost their SEO rankings.

We know which tricks, tools and metrics to work with; we will comprehensively evaluate your Page Speed Insights before formulating an optimization plan specific to your business. Our Page Speed Services are available alongside other SEO services and digital marketing services, such as content marketing, link building and website design.