Regular readers of the Vertical Leap search marketing blog may well recall a post from a few months ago where I looked at Negative SEO Issues with Website Page Loading Speeds.
In summary, we are working on a group of websites that suffer from consistently poor page loading speeds – across 3 websites, these are averaging at over 6 seconds per page according to Google webmaster tools, and Pingdom flags even slower loading times on tests with their tools. I have known it to take as much as 20 seconds to load a home page.
Below are the average page load speeds for the last few months for one of these sites – and these figures are a clear improvement on how they “used” to appear (although still not great):
We’ve dropped the average from 7 seconds to around 5, although there have been some increases in the last few weeks.
This drop of 2 seconds has actually seen the vast majority of the rankings that had taken a tumble when it was averaging 7 seconds – and traffic levels have been restored – I don’t know if this was a “silver bullet” for this website, and I don’t know what you can make of any thresholds that Google may have on site speed, as it’s not something that we have been able to test, but there has been a clear improvement, with very few other factors being manipulated at the time. Take from that what you will.
However – there are implications for this beyond SEO and any rankings that you are attempting to achieve for a campaign. We also work on the PPC account for these sites, and in discussions with their account manager, I was intrigued by the feedback we got from our Google rep about the sites continuing slow page loading issues.
First of all was the statement “In my opinion, the work we do on the account will have very little effect if this is not addressed.” These are strong words!
They went on to explain:
“Needless to say, users value ads that bring them to the information that they want as efficiently as possible. A high-quality landing page should have a fast load time as well as feature unique, relevant content. Fast load times benefit advertisers as well, since users are less likely to abandon a site that loads quickly. An AdWords ad can bring a user to the site, but if they abandon the conversion will be lost.
Each of your keywords will receive a load time grade based on the average load time of the landing pages in the ad group and of any landing pages in the rest of the account with the same domain. If multiple ad groups have landing pages with the same domain, the keywords in all these ad groups will have identical load time grades.
Two things to note:
* When determining load time grade, the AdWords system follows Destination URLs at both the ad and keyword level and evaluates the final landing page.
* – If your ad group contains landing pages with different domains, the keywords’ load time grades will be based on the domain with the slowest load time. All the keywords in an ad group will always have the same load time grade.
We evaluate your load time relative to the average in your server’s geographic region. If your website is hosted on a server in India, for example, your landing page load time will be compared to the average load time in that region of India. This is true even if your website is intended for an audience in the United Kingdom.”
They did come up with some ideas on how to speed up the website:
- Use fewer and faster redirects.
- Don’t use interstitial pages.
- Compress the size of your page.
- Contact your webmaster or web hosting provider to discuss other possibilities.
It was also mentioned:
“The AdWords system re-evaluates landing pages on a regular basis. If you make significant improvements to your landing page’s load time, you should see improved Quality Scores. Note that your Quality Score may be updated incrementally over a number of weeks after you improve your load time.”
Clearly, site speed issues are an issue across all forms of search marketing, and ongoing issues, that are difficult to resolve at the server end, are likely to have an impact on results and conversions across any campaigns that are run for those sites. If you have a site, or sites, that have issues with site speed loading times, the importance of this as a factor is growing, and you should try to address the underlying causes of these things to improve results across the board.
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Interesting read there Pete. Particularly the words from the Adwords account manager.
I’ve always been of the mindset that load speed ultimately falls on the side of CRO and Usability; Google are quite correct to say that it causes a bad customer experience.
However, it’s interesting that your organic rankings improved with such a small increase in load speed and that some of the changes that you suggested can be implemented across all aspects of search marketing to provide the client with an overall increase in campaign performance – something that any SEO would love to deliver!
Thanks for the comment Kev – these sites actually rank pretty well, but I struggle with them as a user, and can only think that improving the user experience here would massively improve the rates that they convert at – from SEO delivered traffic, PPC and everything else they are doing to promote the website!
Nice post Pete. Like Kev said, it’s good to actually see a real tangible response from the AdWords rep about LP load times. At least your PPC guys now have some proper guidance direct from Google that they can pass onto the client.
I’m guessing as well from the PPC side that your team may have seen some landing page loading time warnings in the campaigns. I know that this warning can be infuriating as any QS problems site-side are usually the ones we can’t directly work on & can only inform & recommend improvements (most of which get ‘lost’ or ‘forgotten’).
I know that if I see this warning in any of my accounts the first thing I’m doing it forwarding the rep’s first statement..!
“In my opinion, the work we do on the account will have very little effect if this is not addressed.”
This site speed has been an issue for a considerable time – I think from the moment we took it on, although I came to the project personally somewhat further down the line.
I did love that particular statement from the Rep – I also thought that incremental improvements to this score rather than a realistic improvement if/when it was fixed was strange too – if I fixed a problem, I’d want to see the full benefit of it straight away!
Is there a large(r) than normal difference between the number of clicks recorded in AdWords and Analytics? Might be a way to get an indication of how many people are dropping out during the site load
Problem with this is the stats being used on the site (I hate their stats package), so there are likely some discrepancies just due to the differences in how these are measured.
Pete,
good post, with regards the PPC account manager giving advice on quaility score on ads – I always take this as ‘will improve your SEO quality score’ too. If not now then definately in the future – as Google quite often roll out improvements in PPC first as that is their cash cow.
Use and abuse your Google Rep for as much info as you can for your ‘PPC’ (ahem) queries.
Dan
I’m pretty convinced this websites SEO results would be considerably better if they could fix the root issue here. I certainly try to put some queries the PPC teams way when I get a chance!