Why Fast Websites Perform Better in Local Search Results
If you want to improve your Local SEO, normally SEO experts would suggest things like:
- Optimize your Google Business Profile
- Select the right categories
- Post weekly with high quality videos and photos.
Sound familiar?
While those aren’t wrong, there’s something else you can do that will help not just improve your local SEO but help your business make more money.
That’s making sure your website loads super-fast.
Here’s why it helps:
When someone visits your site, you’ve got an extremely small time-window where you can capture their attention.
Especially with how quick and accessible everything is nowadays, if you’re not able to give your potential customer exactly what they want when they want it, you’ve lost the opportunity to get them as a customer.
And, unfortunately, they’ll most likely go to one of your competitor’s.
In fact, studies show that 53% of people will leave your website if it takes longer than 3-seconds to load on mobile.
That means that for every 100 people that visit your website, if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load, you’ve missed your opportunity to do business with 53 of them!
Imagine how much missed opportunities that is for your business revenue.
Instead, it’s all going to your competitors.
That’s why when our company is competing in super competitive markets like SEO in Auckland, we need to make sure that our page is loading lightning-quickly so that our target customer doesn’t bounce off our page.
Here are the best ways I’ve found to improve your website speed:
Run A Page Speed Test
The first thing I do when wanting to improve page speed for either myself or a client is run a page-speed test.
I go to Google Page Speed Insights and run a quick test.
Within a minute or so, it’ll tell me exactly what the culprit is with what’s keeping my site loading slowly.
Many times, it’ll be that the images are too bulky.
Other times, it might be a hosting issue.
Whatever the case may be, Page Speed Insights will figure it out and tell you so you can have a plan of action to fixing your slow website.
Reduce Image File Size
The killer culprit I see frequently is image bloating.
This is when your website has too many images that take up too much space and time to load your website.
Some images can be literally a few MB, and even just two or three of those on a page can add up quickly.
Here’s how I fix it:
Firstly, go to your page that’s loading slowly and identify the images that’s causing the large chunk of the file-size bulk.
Then, you can either remove those images completely or use a image optimizer to reduce the size while maintaining the quality.
You’d be surprised at how much of a difference this makes to your page load speed.
Better yet – go to your media library and bulk optimize the whole thing.
There’s no point keeping all the extra image file-size if you can reduce it while maintaining the quality.
Remove Unnecessary Videos
Many times, businesses that benefit greatly from Local SEO use videos on their page to establish trust with their target market.
For example, one of the most common businesses are dental practices.
It’s super common for a dental practice to have a video that automatically plays on their homepage showing the sleek, elegant dental practice, friendly staff, accommodating dentists, happy patients, etc.
At first glance, it’s a great idea.
What these businesses don’t know is that if your video isn’t optimized and causes your website to load slowly, you’re forcing those 53% of potential patients to another dental practice!
If you want to use video, you need to find a way to do so that keeps your website loading quickly.
Here’s how:
- Reduce the video file size. You can use a video optimiser that keeps the quality while reducing the bloat.
- Don’t make the video load automatically. Instead, let the customer decide if they want to play it or not. The amount of resources it takes to load and smoothly play the video automatically is huge. Avoid this by allowing your customer to choose if they want to see it or not.
- Scrap the video all together. Use high quality, optimised photos instead.
Use Lazy Loading
Lazy loading is when your website loads just the first part of your website that the target market sees first while loading the other parts later.
Because your customer doesn’t view the entire page at once, it makes complete sense because it still helps with user experience because they’re not waiting for the entire page to load.
It’s similar to something like eating at a restaurant.
One of the ways restaurants can keep you happy, busy and your mind-occupied is by bringing your entrees out first before your mains.
If instead every time you went to a restaurant you had to wait for everything at once, that would take a ton more time and, just like slow page speeds, you’d probably get up to leave!
Lazy loading is exactly that.
It’s about giving you the entree while the cooks prepare your mains.
Or, in website-terms, it’s about loading what your target market sees first – keeping them busy with that – while the rest of the page is loading in the background.
Use Caching
Caching is serving a pre-loaded website to your customer so that the server doesn’t have to load everything again.
Going back to the restaurant analogy – imagine if instead of waiting for your food to be cooked, the chefs were able to magically give you the exact same quality of food as soon as you sat down.
That’s exactly what caching is, and it’s one of the easiest ways to improve your page speed.
