The experience and interaction that every single user has with your brand (often referred to as customer journey), starts with a click of an ad. However, even before that takes place, Google’s algorithms rank the relevance of your ad, which will directly determine the success of the ad campaign. That is where Google’s Quality Score comes into play.
The Quality Score has been created by Google to rank your ads based on their usefulness, keywords, page speed, and landing pages to the user’s experience.
Generally, it’s important to keep track and maintain a high score, since ad campaigns with higher Quality Scores have lower costs per click and win better ad positions. And vice versa as well, campaigns with lower Quality Scores, may pay up to a 400% premium for less-desirable ad placement.
The three factors to keep in mind to reap the benefits of a high-Quality Score are the following:
- Expected CTR (click-through rate)
- Ad Relevance
- Landing Page UX (user experience)
This is especially vital for users that access your website through their mobile, which is more often than not a bigger percentage than desktop users.
When potential and active clients have a slow experience on mobile with your brand, that results in a decrease in the likelihood that they will purchase from you in the future. For many businesses, it translates to many missed opportunities and loss of potential revenue, especially when more than half of visitors have exited the website if a mobile page takes over 3 seconds to load.
Back in 2019, Google announced two new page speed initiatives to help improve the UX on the web. Ever since then, business owners and developers have been urged to pay attention to user-oriented metrics and take advantage of tools such as Lighthouse and PageSpeed Insights, both of which can help drastically improve the user experience.
Additionally, earlier this year the Chrome team announced a new way to rate every website by taking into account factors like load time, responsiveness and visual stability.
These Core Web Vitals capture the experience of the end-user on the website, but especially on mobile devices and since May 2021 have been added to how Google ranks search results.
We at SEO Jokers are determined to help you become as effective as possible, and with this article, we’ll help you understand and maximize your website speed.
Let’s get into it.
What is a landing page UX?
In a nutshell, Google Ads uses landing page user experience as a metric to determine how well connected are your ads and landing page. They use a combination of automation and human evaluation to determine the experience by analyzing the post-click landing page of the user.
The reasoning behind it is that, additionally to the ad itself, your website user experience also affects your ad rank, CPC and ad position. So, if the users have been directed to a slow post-click landing page, it will mean that your ads will show less, and vice versa.
What are the most common reasons for a bad landing page UX?
Unused or underdeveloped code
Some of the backend coding done on the website might be redundant or missing key components as it matures. While we might not need to make huge changes or start from scratch, sometimes a little tweak here and there will do the trick.
Not mobile compatible
In the past few years, more and more web searches have been done by mobile devices and because of that Google is now seeing a website’s mobile page speed as one of the most important factors in deciding quality. Just by looking at Google Analytics, we can see that predominantly our ads are opened via mobile, giving us additional motivation to make the website mobile compatible.
Old un-updated website
A common rule of thumb is that websites need to be updated every 3-5 years due to stay up to date with the new web design breakthroughs and also because Google uses age as a factor.
Large images and videos
Images and videos have an amazing effect on the bottom line of the business but it’s a double-edged sword. It can seriously impart website loading time. Google has recommended for images to be in the jpg2000 format, so expect video to one day have a new improved format in the future.
What is Google Page Speed?
To be able to determine how fast the website is, Google Page Speed measures the time from the moment a website is requested to when it’s delivered and ready for input in the browser.
To be able to do a complete score and speed assessment of the website, Google’s Page Speed score measures several factors of the page-load experience. The reason why the score is in-depth is to verify that your website is technically up to speed and provides the right user experience.
How to optimize your website for an excellent Page Speed score?
With all of the above, we have established that page speed is crucial to the success of the website. Now, you are probably asking yourself how we can optimize the website for peak performance. If you are, you would be among a select few businesses that try to improve this aspect, since a 2019 study found that many websites were “missing the mark”, with a load time of 10 seconds or more, both on mobile and computers.
Well established companies have the capacity and willingness to achieve a fast page speed, while smaller websites might struggle or just shrug it off. Additionally to the mentioned above, other factors may affect the page load time, such as server performance, page optimization, the user’s Wi-Fi, etc.
Hence why, when making improvements, we need to make sure that we cover a wide range of optimizations, not just one aspect, to run a highly effective website. These are the most common things big tech companies do to improve and maintain a fast website speed:
Mobile Page Speed Optimization
A report from Statista showed that in Q4 2021 over 54% of website traffic comes from mobile devices and it’s a trend that is slowly and surely increasing. As most mobile phones and browsers not only access the internet at slower speeds but also optimize content differently, we must optimize our website for a fast page speed on mobile.
That is why it’s recommended that we use AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) to render the website faster on mobile phones. Just by doing that you will be ahead of the curb since some of the businesses focus exclusively on the desktop UX.
Image & Video Optimization
Images, logos and videos give a bit more flair to the website and can even increase conversions if done correctly. However, we must compress images to achieve the perfect balance of image clarity and page speed.
The more the images are compressed, the faster the load time, and vice versa. Before going live with this, it’s paramount to do testing to see the image quality from a standpoint of a client.
Additionally, videos slow down the website speed even more so than images. If you need to add videos, keep them as compressed as possible. We recommend a link to a YouTube video, rather than embedding it yourself (just like we have done in this blog post).
Loading Page Elements Prioritization
Not all elements are created equal. Some are more important than others. Having said that, we can improve load time by prioritizing which element loads first.
The elements that are visible about the fold are on the top of the priority list, while we can delay loading styling, JavaScript logic, and images that are visible below the fold.
Additionally, we need to make sure that we limit as many server requests as possible since each mobile page makes over 200 server requests on average. Some of them happen simultaneously, while some may happen one after the other. That is why we need to make sure that we review every server request to understand the benefits of each request.
Another big one is enabling HTTPS and HTTP/2 to provide website integrity, encryption, authentication, and a better UX.
Additionally, we would recommend watching this video to get familiar with the most common SEO questions and myths around page speed:
Complicated Ad Tracking Reduction
A sensitive topic indeed, especially since many websites rely on ad revenue. It slows down the website speed significantly for the user because different ad algorithms calculate what to display before the page fully renders itself.
While it is vital for many companies, it’s important to carefully optimize what data is used for ad tracking. The perfect balance between effectiveness and performance is key.
Remove complex themes and designs
Of course, the goal of any website is to generate as many conversions as possible. One of the ways businesses attempt to do this is by having a website that stands out with a bold look and exceptional design. However, the downside to that is that it will decrease the effectiveness of the performance of the website.
We need to make sure that we evaluate our themes and designs to determine which ones will have the least impact on performance while keeping in mind the page speed. There are frameworks that can help you create a modern responsive website with very little performance impact.
Performance Testing
After all of the optimizations have been done, we need to make sure that we test the website as much as possible to make sure that we achieve the required level of performance and load speed.
To be able to achieve this, we need to develop appropriate performance and load tests that will help you calculate and determine the effectiveness of the website performance. There are a lot of software companies that will help you achieve this, so pick the one that you prefer.
Content Delivery Network
Although setting up a Content Delivery Network (CDN) does not directly affect page speed score, it helps by reducing visitor abandonment rate if done correctly. The further away your visitor is from where your website is hosted, the longer it takes for data packets to reach them. Location plays an important role in page load speed. At first, it would seem uncontrollable, but if you have set up your site with a CDN, your website will be able to load faster.
CDN is a network of servers designed to distribute content such as images, javascript files, videos, etc. closer to your visitors. Instead of delivering data from one point to another, your data gets distributed to a network of servers for people from various parts of the world to access as if your hosting server is close to them. Additionally, CDN does not only reduce latency, it also reduces bandwidth consumption, increases content redundancy, and improves website security.
The Importance of Page Speed
The speed of your website will make or break your business. It’s one of the factors that determine the UX (user experience) and rate of conversions. Research shows that a 2-second delay in page load can lead to more than a 4% loss in visitor satisfaction. Impatient visitors that leave before getting to know your product can and will affect your bottom line.
Page speed is so important, that Google has made it one of the most important ranking factors. To help businesses out, one of the tools that Google has developed to improve your loading page speed is called Google Lighthouse.
Another useful tool is PageSpeed Insights, in which you can write your website and Google will let you know what it thinks of your pages speed.
We would also suggest watching this video on how to improve landing page UX:
However, it is not an easy task to achieve on your own. That is why we are SEO Jokers as determined to bring your website, SEO, and Marketing to the next level.
Contact us today to find out more, by clicking here.
See you at the next one.
