Video Transcript – Speed & SEO More Important Than Ever

Speed & SEO More Important Than Ever – original post here

Hey, welcome back Rankers. I’m having an awesome week. Last Friday I got a number one, and the client was over the moon. Well, not really client because she was one of the bloggers who we used, whose site we used in the bloggers SEO product that’s coming out very soon. If you want to know more about that, head across to, bloggersSEO.com or bloggersSEO.com.au and sign up there.

The awesome thing about that one was that the SEO stuff was actually quite easy to do because she was already blogging. She was already blogging; she was already looking after her audience. She was already trying to build her audience, and that’s what makes SEO so much easier if you’re doing those things. Because what happens is that you’re getting all that love and the links and stuff that people share about your content and those sorts of things and the sticky time on the site.

Google knows that people love the site, regardless of how many back links you’ve got. She only had 38 back links. Therefore, Google knows things like bounce rates and all that sort of stuff, because they’ll tell you that the Google Analytics team doesn’t talk to the ranking team or the algorithm team. However, the algorithm team, I’m sure, have access to all the data that is coming in via Google Chrome and those sorts of things. Anyway, build your audience first, and you can worry about the SEO later.

Now, another announcement this week. On Thursday, don’t forget we’ve got the webinar on site migration. So if you’re thinking about pushing a new site live, please don’t until you’ve watched this free webinar, seriously. If you want to keep your business, and you want to keep traffic from Google, watch this webinar first. If you want to know when that is, just tweet me @JimBoot or sign up to the newsletter at stewartmedia.com.au, and we will make sure that you are notified.

Now, I had an interesting conundrum this week with a client. His conversion rate had dropped from 1.5% to 1%, and we were doing some…the data was…long story. We didn’t have a lot of data to compare to because it was erroneous, anyway. But what we knew was that back in April we discovered that there was a conversion drop. And this is under organic conversion rate in behaviour in Google Analytics. And you can see a 33% conversion rate drop for an e-commerce site is bad. And so this little blip here is their developer’s went and pushed a responsive site live, but you can see it was in April obviously. And anyway, some stuff happened with the code, and that’s why we’ve got this anomaly here.

But it was a 33% drop in their conversion rates. So because they pushed that responsive design live, you would have to say cause and effect here. You would have to say, well, they did this thing, and this thing happened. I know the correlation doesn’t always equal causation, we’ll get to that in a second, but that was significant. So I went through and looked at all the different browser types, operating system types. Maybe it’s the operating environment of some users that are coming to the site that’s affected the responsive design. It’s affecting conversion rates. It wasn’t any of that. It took me hours. What a waste of time that was. I learned heaps.

So then, I looked at the site speed overview, and look at this. Before the responsive design, it was five seconds. After the responsive design, it was ten seconds. Now, you might say, “Well, five seconds, that’s ridiculously slow.” Yes, however, this data here is also out of Google Analytics and it’s out of the site’s speed overview. And it’s based on a sample set of users that are coming to the site. So what comes into play there are all sorts of things, like load of the server at the time, what the user’s browser is, and all sorts of things.

However, what the relative difference is what we’re looking at. We’re looking at a doubling of page load times after that update. You would have to say, well, there’s a correlation or causation. Well, you think it’s a causation, right? Because there’s nothing else. We can’t find anything else. Anyway, so the client and we’d been talking about speed for some time, so the client upgraded last Friday, and you can see here since then, their traffic has increased by 34%. That’s not what we’re trying to do; we’re trying to fix conversion rates. I don’t want to increase traffic.

All these rankings came up, and I’ll talk to you about it tomorrow, Travis. All these rankings came up, but our e-commerce conversion rate, year on year, is still down. We need to do some more digging there. I also used…by the way; revenue was up 39% as well. So we’re not complaining. However, there’s still some money there on the table that we can go and grab if we can work out what’s going on here with these woeful conversion rates.

And thanks to…I have to thank Glenn Gabe for this. Glenn Gabe on Twitter, this bloke, go and follow him if you’re looking for really interesting stuff about SEO. He writes great stuff, and he’s got a really good article today about algorithm updates for Google this year. He’s got some interesting tools and techniques and those sorts of things, and I used some of them today in isolating which pages possibly were low in conversion rates, on this site in particular. Some pages, the conversion rates are up by 1000%, other pages are down by 500%.

So it’s interesting that you should go and look at those pages. You’ll go, “What’s wrong with this page? Or was it a different page last year? Did we update this page? What is it?” So there are some really good tools. I won’t go into it now because it’s quite extensive what he’s done. But just go and follow him on Twitter, anyway. That was really interesting for the speed issues. So we’re already, I mean, the site, the client’s site, you might say five seconds is pretty slow, but it wasn’t really five seconds, like in the Google Search Console it’s about 1.5 seconds which is still too slow. We want it down to 500 milliseconds in the Google Search Console, and that’s the bot reporting rather than the users reporting. Anyway, get faster.

Hopefully, that’s helpful, and we’ll see you at the webinar. Thanks very much. Bye.