These days, just having a website isn't enough. If you want people to find your business on the internet, you need to invest some amount of time and/or money into Search Engine Optimization. This is the process of optimizing your site to have high rankings on the major search engines (Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo). It's possible to optimize an existing site for SEO, but if you're building a site from scratch, knowing what will give you better rankings will guide many of your decisions with that site. Things like page structure, URL structure, titles for blog posts or resource articles, fonts, background colors, there are many choices that can be made when building a website that affect SEO, and that's one of the reasons it's important to hire a professional designer and developer when building your site. They will be up-to-date on the latest Google expectations, as well as how to design and build the site from the ground up in the most SEO-friendly way, which will also usually be the most responsive and accessible way as well.
If you're using a website builder, you can still use some of these principles, but you may not have as much control over some features.
Is site performance important for search engine rankings?
There are a lot of misunderstandings out there about what site performance is, and why it's important. Many people aren't aware of the connection between performance and SERP either. I'll explain both here.
Google measures certain things when they crawl and index your site, which is the first step to your site showing up on search engine results pages (SERPs) at all. For your page to rank highly for a certain query, or group of queries, Google looks for signs that your website is authoritative and useful. It also measures how easy it is for the average person to access your site, and how easy it is for people with visual or physical impairments to access your site. One of the reasons people focus on backlinks so much is that they prove authority and usefulness (someone likes your content so much that they are linking to it from their own site), however there are many other aspects to having a healthy Domain Authority score, and ranking highly on SERPs.
When Google is crawling and indexing your site, they also test what they call the Core Web Vitals. These are a collection of rules that they would like to see a website follow regarding how quickly the landing page loads, how easy it is to access the site with a page reader, how easy it is for anyone to read the text, what format the images are in, and how efficient your CSS and JavaScript have been written. This also includes how long it takes to load any third-party scripts, so sometimes using that fancy animation or JS interaction isn't worth it if it slows your site down! A developer will be able to help you balance performance with aesthetics, and will know when an image should be a png, jpg or an svg, as well as how compressed they should be. Depending on what kind of site you have, there are also certain performance optimizations that can be done regarding the way that JavaScript is loaded on your site, and whether it blocks the HTML from loading.
The other element at play is the actual human being accessing your site. Multiple studies have shown that the average person will give a website around three seconds to load before leaving and trying another site. You can test your page speed here
, which will give you an idea of how long it takes to load your site on a mobile phone connecting with 3G/4G. You may think your site looks great on your office computer, but it's always important to look at your site on as many devices as possible, and with different levels of internet connection, to get a sense of how fast your site is under real working conditions. You can even test this in Chrome developer tools, if you're familiar with those.
Can my website's responsiveness affect my SEO?
Absolutely, it can and will affect both how often search engines recommend your site, as well as how long people actually stay on your site without looking for a solution somewhere else. As we discussed in the previous section, how people access your site on mobile devices is incredibly important. Depending on where you live in the world, it's possible that up to 70% of your population is accessing the internet on their phones by default. If your site is buggy or doesn't work on mobile, modern web users will leave and go to another site.
How important is content to SEO?
Content is the lifeblood of any webpage. Whether you are selling a product, giving away free advice, or trying to get people to watch your gaming videos, content is king. You want backlinks? Write quality content. You want to be number one on SERPs for your woodworking? Show people how incredible it is on your webpage, and you will rank higher. Your content should be structured so that every page has one H1 heading tag, and then each section on that page has an H2. Your content should match the font style and sizes that you use in the rest of your site, and pictures need to be compressed. Large pictures should usually be jpgs, while smaller pictures can be pngs or svgs. There are multiple free image converters online that will do all of this work for free in seconds, and your SERP will thank you. Having clean, well-organized content wrapped in a logical, structured and well-designed website will bring you the SEO and business results that you are looking for.
SEO takes time
The most important aspect of all of this is patience. Once you've designed, built and launched your site, it's time to consistently add content, and just let the site be! It can be tempting to fiddle with your site, and make changes hoping to see SEO shifts right away, but that's not how search engines measure authority and usefulness. A site is authoritative and useful if people come back time after time to the same structure, and new content. When real human users know they can use your site as some kind of resource, they will link to it, you will rank higher in SERPs, and your website will actually serve your business instead of being a money drain on your business month after month.
As always, if you feel in over your head, consult a professional. For a couple hours of consultation, we can help you devise an SEO strategy that will get you back on track, and make your website a SERP superstar!
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