Marketing directors and business owners have entered a new, more enlightened era where they are more comfortable with SEO basics. Briefing SEO strategy and managing an SEO agency is almost a prerequisite in today’s marketing world.
Content is King
They understand that content is king, the difference between organic and PPC, and that success is not instant or guaranteed. There are some factors thought that aren’t part of the basics and are unrelated to content, but should still be in any marketer’s mind when reviewing their site experience.
Page load times can have an effect on how your site is regarded by Google. The premise is that Google’s mission is not only to provide everyone with the content they want but to make sure they have a great experience. They will therefore penalise sites that don’t live up to their experience criteria and have suggested that page load time fits this bill. Page load is the time it takes to get to your site from a search result or other click.
What does this mean for the humble marketing manager that has only just grasped link text? The truth is, very little. The actual contribution of page load times to SEO will be negligible at best. It does however offer bigger issues.
Increase your existing users’ experiences
There are now a myriad of third party options for us to include on our sites that will increase our existing users’ experiences. These may slow down page load times, so the question is whether exceeding our existing customers’ experiences (those that will battle on regardless of how long it takes to get there) should be favoured over possibly finding new audiences who may give up and go elsewhere. Something to consider when reviewing that next third party add on.
The other issue is of course that SEO is an ever-changing landscape. The modern marketer cannot simply read up on the basics and file it away. They need to feed their knowledge in order to understand the effects of algorithm changes on their business. Page load times are just one of many factors that may affect their visibility.
