Featured Image Caption: Mobile Page Speed on Ranking
Jump to read...
Google recently announced its new ranking algorithm which it refers to as ‘speed update’ specially designed for search on mobile devices. The speed of a webpage will become an important ranking factor in mobile Google search.
The change will be in effect in July 2018 and aims to discourage slow loading websites. But the change is not so enormous to consider it as the only factor. As per Google, the change will only affect the sites that “deliver the slowest experience to users”. It will impact only a small percentage of searchers.
Majority of the users today are using mobile devices for their search, and therefore this change can be crucial for the businesses as well as users. Page speed for the mobiles has been a long overdue step. The goal is to offer mobile users better search experience.
There is not much information from Google about how the website owners can improve their sites for better rankings.
But there are a few things that websites should take note of to provide an enhanced user experience and improve rankings:
1. Only slow loading websites will be affected. But there is no benchmark to measure the performance of your site in search results.
2. Also, there is no available tool or method for website owners to know whether their website is affected by the update.
3. Relevancy and quality of the content still matter. The search engine giant has indicated that a search page even if a bit slow, may rank high if it has unique and relevant content.
4. Make your website lightning fast. Mobile users should be able to load the page within a second or two.
5. The slow speed of web pages increases the bounce rates and negatively impacts the conversion rates for the business. Users do not have the patience for the slow download, and they have many other options available.
6. Websites should do away with the additional content that slows down the speed. Heavy videos and repeatedly playing audios not only takes time to download but are irritating too.
7. To improve user experience, site owners need to say goodbye to full page pop-ups too. They should implement an efficient webpage design with easy navigability for users. A mobile website should enable users to find and accomplish what they came for easily.
8. If you need your customers to act on something – may be download a brochure or any other action they need to perform, it might be a good idea to display a strong call-to-action as soon as the page loads.
9. You can use tools like Page Speed Insights or GTmetrix to assess your page speed and make sure that the website pages are being displayed properly on mobile devices.
10. AMP pages (Accelerated Mobile Page technology to speed up mobile rendering) load very fast and you can consider using AMP. But it is not a ranking factor as of now.
It is the time that companies gear up their efforts and improve their mobile webpage speeds. Not only a fast website will impact your rankings in Google but will also perform better in terms of user engagement and conversion.
By Vineet Kumar Singh
who is a professional Digital Marketing Expert. He started his career as web developer and soon enter into the exciting field of Digital Marketing. Currently, He is web developer and SEO expert at Content Holic which is one of the best Digital Marketing Agency in Delhi.
Member since April, 2018
View all the articles of Vineet Kumar Singh.
Leave a Reply