Speed in 2019. What the tools won’t tell you
Welcome to 2019 everyone! We kick off the new year with a greater emphasis on revenue over rankings. There are several metrics we use to improve revenue, but one of the most important is still speed. It’s a greatly underestimated metric that affects so many elements of your site.
What I learned
- 2019 should be about revenue; not rankings
- Speed can impact revenue across all channels
- Discover the tools we use to measure speed
- Why speed is so important for revenue
Transcript
Hey welcome back Rankers, Happy New Year, and what is big for SEO in 20- no I’m not doing that, they make me go to sleep those podcasts. I don’t care what’s big for SEO in 2019, I care what’s big for revenue in 2019. Revenue over rankings every time, and I want to talk to you a little bit about one of the metrics that we look at a lot, and that is speed. How that can impact the revenue across each of your channels. So it will impact your organic, how much traffic you get, how well it converts, paid, direct, email, all of these things are affected by speed.
There’s a number of tools that I use when we’re looking at speed, and Google Search Console crawl stats, webpagetest.org, GTMetrics.com, and the one that I’m using a lot right, because I really enjoy the data that it’s giving me is the web.dev, from Google. It is based on lighthouse technology, which is part of the Chrome browser, but it will go and tell you stuff that the other tools aren’t telling you. Like in this case it’s giving us a 14 out of 100 for performance, that’s bad. When you go and have a look at the time to interactive, which is down here, it says it takes 35 seconds for this page to become interactive. That’s 35 seconds before anyone can put anything in that page, or click on a button or anything, add to cart, whatever.
So that also tells you a whole bunch of other things, like what scripts might be taking too long to load, how much JavaScript evaluation time is being taken up by those scripts. All of these sorts of things that you may not know, but then there are things that these tools don’t tell you, but they may still be speed. That’s things like, for instance, you might see a problem like this if you’re looking you might see the lion’s share of our traffic to the site is mobile. But people aren’t transacting, look at that conversion rate, they’re just not transacting on mobile, so that’s a problem. YouÕve gotta go and have a look at that because finding that problem isn’t necessarily going to be in the tools. It’s going to be going through on a variety of devices, and looking at what’s going on. In the case of this particular client, the site is a horrible user experience in mobile, things pop up where they shouldn’t. There are things that you would think are linked somewhere, and they’re linked elsewhere, so it’s a confusing experience for the user.
Sometimes the clients will come back and say no, we wanna get our rankings higher. Like look, you got money on the table right here, let’s fix that, let’s fix… because you’re annoying these people, right? You’re annoying these customers, and if you’ve got people coming into the shop and you’re annoying them and then sending them away without anything, they’re unlikely to come back or they’ll go and find another shop. You’ve lost them, whereas if you can get them, you can transact, you’ve got them for a lifetime if you look after them. That’s why things like speed, which affects everything and that’s not just how fast your pages load, but it’s how fast can the user the transact on the site?
Hopefully, that’s helpful, have a great 2019. We’ll see you next week, thank you very much, Hey, if youÕve got anything you want me to have a look at this year let us know, and please tell your friends, share, that’d be cool. Thanks, bye.
Jim’s been here for a while, you know who he is.
