Attempting to prove page speed issues? . Look no farther than its effects on SEO rankings. Faster pages equal better rankings and everyone is able to get faster.

Consumers anticipate, and programs to respond quickly. Each second of delay can cost $100K in lost revenue for brands. There are tools to help understand a page’s overall speed. Looking at the relationship between page speed and Search engine optimization ranking; it shows that its having a faster acting site/page does impact ranking in a positive way, albeit marginally. As entrepreneurs look for additional data points on the reason why they ought to Prioritize page speed; Jason Tabeling highlights the information and how does it fit into a general search engine optimization strategy. 

The saying is, Speed Kills. , But with regards to digital speed, it is really, Slow speed kills. According to a research by Google and Deloitte for each 0.1 seconds your page speed improves may increase your conversion rates by 8%. That data point produces a pretty strong business case to improve the performance of your website. Think about it data point from your very own experience browsing the internet, mobile, and desktop. Have you ever discovered a page was loading too slow? which you moved on to something else, or brand lost the sale? I know I have. 

Thus, we know that speed improves the page functionality, but what about how it impacts SEO rankings? I took a look at a small data set to try to get a feeling of the impact that page speed has on rankings. I took 10 retail and conversion based key words and ran the specific webpages throughout the Google Page Speed Test to look at the correlation between speed and rank. This data set provides a good directional analysis on the impact. Here’s what I discovered. Rank and page speed are only slightly connected. Creating a point cloud of every Website rank with the page speed shows the distribution. 

Page Speed and Rank – The Correlation

The significance of the data indicates there’s only a 0.08 correlation. A correlation of 1 will be perfectly connected. So, this score is not very high; but there’s a correlation. When you are looking for an advantage and you know the impact of speed on conversion rate becomes really meaningful.

The way to predict the impact is to utilize the trendline and its incline. If you remember your algebra course you are able to use this data to produce the equation of a line. It estimates what your page speed needs to be an achieve a specific rank. Applying that equation you can see that each 10 points of extra speed approximately equals a 10th of a point in rank improvement. So moving from a speed score of 10 equals a rank of 5.3; however, a page speed of 100 will be equal to a rank of 4.4. This May Not seems like a big deal; but remember speed radically improves conversion prices also has a positive Effect on rank as well.

What action should you take?

Here’s a summary of a few actions you may take to maximize your speed.

Improve your page rate

There are a myriad of opportunities for brands to increase their page rate. Probably the most surprising thing was how many sites they had quite slow rate rankings. Look at the information in the histogram below. 56 percent of page rate scores came back <20. That is pretty remarkable considering there are some very well known brands in this study. There are so many opportunities to improve page speed and Google’s tool, and many others provide very step by step actions to take to improve. If you haven’t run your site through this tool or another one you should do that to start

Don’t forget that speed is important but it’s just one of many factors that impact SEO rankings

While this article is about speed, it should be clear that SEO has many more key items that impact rank and overall results than speed. SEO is a holistic strategy that includes content and technical resources. You can’t forget about how well your content resonates with your audience, how fresh it is, and how well the search engine spiders can crawl and understand your site. So many businesses get caught up in their re-platforming their ecommerce platform and never put a minute of thought into the SEO strategy.