Communicating SEO’s Value To Clients And C-Level Execs

When it comes to marketing activities, SEO is often the first thing on the chopping block when budget cuts come around.

As an SEO professional, you understand the value of your work. You also understand that not all of your clients or prospects (or C-level execs if you’re working in house) fully appreciate what is required to really make SEO work.

This can be due in part to the fact that proving return on investment for dollars spent on SEO can be challenging. That does not mean, however, that it is impossible.

It is important to track ROI on SEO efforts. You need to do this to justify your worth to your clients and your clients need it to justify continued expenditures to themselves or their management.

Sadly, SEO is one of the first things that many businesses let go in favor of activities that more readily present themselves with hard ROI statistics. How do you combat this?

Let The Numbers Do The Talking

When proving the value of SEO, utilizing hard data is a must. The following steps can streamline this process:

1. Measure leads
2. Measure revenue
3. Measure revenue per leads

You can calculate revenue per leads by simply dividing the total amount of revenue by the total number of leads.

A Word (Or Two) About Leads

Perhaps the first thing that must be said here is that page visits are not necessarily leads. They can be, but they do not have to be. Tracking page visits can provide a snapshot of overall activity, but the data most important to track here when mapping it back to revenue are events or goals.

Events and goals in Google Analytics can be confusing to many companies. Turn this confusion into an opportunity for you by educating clients about them — what they are and why they are important to businesses.

Start by clearly explaining what events and goals are, as follows:

• Events: An event is a particular action that a user engages in while on a website. Examples include clicking on links or downloading information or assets. Each event indicates some form of engagement by a visitor, indicating that particular prospect is more qualified than one who simply visits a page. Hence, the importance of tracking events versus just page views.
• Goals: A goal, as the name suggests, is something that you want to happen. In terms of web visits, there are four important goals a business may want to track. The first is visits to a particular URL, such as a confirmation page. The second is the length of time that a person spends on a site. The third is the number of pages on a site viewed in a single visit. The fourth is actually an event as noted above.

Tracking events and goals gives you and your clients far more insight into their prospect and customer behavior that simply tracking the number of people who came to their sites ever could. These metrics can also tie directly into revenue stream data.

Set Yourself – And Your Clients – Up For Success

Perhaps one of the most important elements of accurately measuring the ROI of your SEO work is to set the stage from the get-go. Ensuring that you and your clients are on the same page can go a long way toward avoiding some unpleasant (and unnecessary) experiences.

Once again, you are presented with an opportunity to shine by showcasing your expertise and sharing it with your clients. The more you teach your clients, the more you empower them and the more you increase their loyalty to you.

The three most important points to establish with new clients are:

1. SEO Is A Long-Term Proposition

Instant gratification is great but that is not at all what SEO is about. This may not be what clients want to hear but it is exactly what you need to tell them. The upside to this is that SEO can return benefits for the long haul, boosting its value tremendously.

Even when search result positions improve, revenue increases may not yet be apparent for some time. It is vital that clients understand this and be willing to wait more than just a few months to get what they really want.

2. How To Measure ROI

It is not just the revenue per lead or even the number of events or goals that indicate success with an SEO program.

Because SEO can take some time to realize its full potential, there are many things along the way that should be measured to track progress such as the removal of Google penalties. Additionally, some metrics are simply not directly trackable to revenue, like a click to driving directions.

3. How To Set Up Analytics

If your clients’ analytics are not set up to track conversions properly, the analytics themselves may paint an incorrect picture. Work closely with your clients to make sure all analytics are setup to capture and show what you need to know.

Establishing these concepts when you first begin working with a client goes a long way toward a healthy — and profitable— relationship between you and that client.

SEO Is Not About Getting Leads

SEO is about getting the right leads. It is also about accurately tracking those leads so that you can make adjustments to your activities as need be but also so that you can accurately help your clients calculate their ROI for SEO.

Content Source - http://nuzzel.com/sharedstory/09012014/searchengineland/communicating_seos_value_to_clients_and_clevel_execs

6 Ways to Use Social Media for Actionable Insight

Social media represents the largest source of consumer data in the history of the world.

Social media 'listening' is a no-brainer.

People like you and me willingly go online to share their passions, concerns and opinions about almost everything. And the companies that have embraced social listening are seeing a huge 'return' in the insights gleaned from this public source of consumer data.

The biggest challenge for teams, quite frankly, is selecting the right tool(s) when the options seem endless. (Has anyone else seen this chart? And that was two years ago!) Most of these solutions allow you to monitor, measure, publish and engage in some way across or multiple social media channels. Don't get me wrong, numbers and charts and graphs really do look great at first. But, once the initial "wow" factor wears off, those quantitative measurements serve more as 'health checks' for content and engagement programs than a metric to share with the C-Suite to demonstrate value to the bottom line. 

Hope is not lost. Our industry is getting there, but we must first move beyond social media monitoring.

What's next?

Every social media marketer should google "text analytics" and "data scientist." Since I'm not an expert at either, I can't connect words and phrases to measure their meaning (which is what text analytics is if I way over simplify it) or identify patterns in data and develop advanced algorithms (which is a fraction of what a data scientist can do). But I do know that I want those people on my team so I can gain a competitive advantage. 

Social Media Intelligence turns consumer data into action.

With the right research partner, this level of insight is possible. 

Here are six ways to use social media for actionable insights:

1. Discover unknown unknowns. Sometimes you just don’t know what you don’t know, which means you may not ask your consumers the right question to reveal an 'aha' moment. Enlist a trained researcher to scan the wealth of conversations taking place across social media channels to reveal insights that can jumpstart your next campaign. Don't limit your channels to just Facebook and Twitter either. Look at blogs, forums and public message boards. The short-form of Facebook and Twitter are great for finding "whats," where the latter provide context to know the "whys."
    
2. Richer Audience Segmentation. Traditional demographics like age, gender and location are becoming a thing of marketing past. The ability to drill down into attitudes and specific preferences to personalize each marketing engagement is becoming status quo. Social media intelligence can help you better understand your audience and what makes them tick by using text analytics to 'decode' their social conversations to reveal unmet needs and secret desires.
    
3. Product Development. The best products do one thing: fulfill an unmet need. This could be in the product itself or the way it’s marketed and communicated to its target audience. Use social media to survey the buying landscape, scope out the competition and ensure your product meets the need(s) your audience is telling you they need.
    
4. Campaign Effectiveness. You know the saying, “quality over quantity?” Well, it has never been truer than in the current age of technology where everything is shared, retweeted, liked, reposted, hash tagged and, if you’re really lucky, even spoofed! Chasing arbitrary metrics can be exhausting and provides little value over time, which is why many companies are moving to social media intelligence for more intrinsic measures – like reputation lift – to inform strategy for their next campaign.
    
5. Event/Conference Improvement. If attendees at your last event were carrying smartphones, you best believe they were taking “selfies” and tweeting about their experiences. You can track those slices of feedback and analyze them to discover a number of things, like which speaker(s) hit the mark or which issues caused pain points (e.g., long registration lines or low-quality Wi-Fi access). Knowing what went right and what fell short helps inform the event-planning process the next time around.
    
6. PR Effectiveness. Protecting brand reputation is a PR team’s primary objective. What if you could get out in front of a potential crisis before it crippled your ability to respond, or you could monitor public perception during a challenging time for your company or brand. Use the wealth of information shared across social channels to drill deeper into what specific messages are working or what topics do more harm than good. This level of insight can help your team justify its strategy in a number of ways.

Before social media, it wasn't as easy to extract public opinion or glean consumer perception in almost real-time. Now, with advanced research and Social Media Intelligence, we can glean real insights to inform business strategy in so many ways.

What have you done to move your company past monitoring? I'd love to hear how you've been successful.

Source - 6 Ways to Use Social Media for Actionable Insight

Content Marketing Rules: What to Ditch and What to Keep

When reaching out to your leads and the targeted audience is on the agenda, content marketing is an approach that works.

The digital landscape is rapidly changing and different ways to promote our products and services are adding new dimensions to the way marketing was done in the past. The old mainstream habits have made way for innovation. And when was the last time you referred to the number of press releases you launched for your product to evaluate the reach of your brand or measure the success of your promotional endeavors.

Content marketing is not about press releases!

But, with an increasing awareness among the brands regarding the typical and atypical content marketing ways, more and more business owners have resorted to multiple ways to use content for maximizing their reach. That could include running a blog, or boosting their social media presence, or for that matter, continuing on with their email marketing.

…and that’s how the “Rules” were born

With the frenzy over content marketing as a potent tool to maximize brand’s presence over the web, the digital marketeers of the web have curated some “unwritten content marketing rules” that are being increasingly referred  to by those who are novices.

So, what really are these rules? Do you need to follow them to their last thread? Or maybe you need to listen to your own requirements and make your own rules.

Well, it’s a bit of both.

Instead of building from the ground up, it would be easier for you to go with the tried and true ways, but at the same time, using approaches that are relevant to your brand is what will serve you in the long run.

Here are some rules to “ditch” and some to “keep”

1. A rule to ditch: The title of post *Has to be shorter*

Shorter and crisper titles not exactly a passe, but if you are under the impression that your visitors will always find the lengthy titles too unwieldy to read, you have not been keeping up with the trends. The best of websites and bloggers can be observed of making their post breaking all the rules of word limit. Their titles sometimes end up being as long as 80 characters (at times longer), and they are still doing as far as gaining traffic is concerned.

A common myth going around the web is that the Internet readers are too impatient to read a long-drawn out title and they instead pay attention to the ones that express the theme in 5-6 words. The truth however lies somewhere between “definitely” and “not quite”. If you are able to make your title interesting enough, you have got their attention.

Look at Buzzfeed for inspiration

Buzzfeed has indeed created a buzz riding on their unconventional long titles that grab a reader’s attention.

2. A rule to keep: Include search-friendly phrases or words in the title

Now, there is no dearth of words and phrases that have a dominating presence over the web. As visitors, we usually start our queries on Google with certain words that include:

• How to
• What are
• Why is
• Difference Between
• Tips to/for
• Free
• New
• Best
• Good

Now that you are already open to using long titles, injecting these keywords or phrases shouldn’t be a matter of force-fitting them.

3. Rule to ditch: Email marketing is passe, go for social media marketing

There is absolutely no doubt over the efficacy of social media as a marketing tool, but you would be widely off the mark in your analysis if you believe you don’t need email marketing.

All you need to do is to observe how many fans on your Facebook  page see your posts on their Newsfeed. I have observed it to drop as abysmally as 0.3%. on my luckiest day, it sometimes reaches in excess of 5%, but that is rare.

Twitter is now a much better alternative for organic reach.

Posts on your blog that are are directly delivered to the inbox of your readers is effective and an essential part of content marketing.

In fact why don’t you start building your email list with Facebook using a tool like Heyo’s free contest builder.

4. Rule to keep: Write longer posts

Whilst there is an anti-rule as well to the word limit which suggests that you write shorter posts to stand a better chance of capturing the attention of readers, but most experts would advise you to write longer posts. The more information your post provides (unless you are just forcing-in words), more eyeballs it manages to grab. Let’s elucidate it further by the study Moz performed a while back:

Moz ran a test on their blog to evaluate the number of backlinks they customarily get based on the length of the posts:

As far the links to those posts were concerned, here is the graph for links against number of words:

But it doesn’t end with Google and links, the social media users like to Share and Like longer posts much more than the shorter posts. Neil Patel observed that the posts written in more than 1500 words received these results:

• 68.1% more tweets
• 22.6% more Facebook likes

It has been proven that content-rich posts get more ‘Likes’ and ‘Shares’ across the social media and most importantly, Google likes them!

So, with more links and likes to the content which lasts for more than 1500 words, it can be safely deduced that you don’t have to hold back while writing a post.

5. An evergreen rule that’s beyond ditching and keeping: Make your blog conversational

Conversational writing is now an essential approach to content marketing. And what is one way to do that? By asking questions.

Refashioning that approach, you can use it for your blogs as well. Whilst you don’t have to change the approach you take while writing your blogs, you can tweak the conclusion part by adding a relevant question at the end of each post, asking readers to express their opinions in the comment box.

Increasing activity in the comment box leads to increased engagement on your website. But don’t make that question scientific or filled with jargons. Ask a question the likes of which can be answered by the general audience, and you will see a lot many hands raised.

Wrapping up

Content marketing isn’t an exercise where you need to overplot and overcook, but it sure is a practice where focusing on the relevant, and getting rid of the fluff is what matters to fuel more-than-desirable results come down the pike.

Read more at http://www.jeffbullas.com/2014/08/11/content-marketing-rules-what-to-ditch-and-what-to-keep

How to Create a Site Structure That Will Enhance SEO

The better your site structure, the better your chance of higher ranking in the search engines. Every website has some “structure.” It might be a rigorous and streamlined structure, or it may be a disorganized jumble of pages. If you are intentional and careful with your site structure, you will create a site that achieves search excellence.

In this article, I share some of the best advice on creating a powerful site structure. The tips below will help you create a site that appeals to users, gets crawled and indexed by spiders, and delivers the best SERP listings and rankings possible.

Why Structure Matters

As I’ve worked with hundreds of clients over the years, I’ve been surprised at how often site structure is overlooked. On the one hand, it’s one of the most crucial aspects of a site’s SEO performance, but on the other hand, few webmasters and owners understand what it means to have a site structure that enhances SEO.

I’m going to share a few of the reasons why site structure is so crucial, and then get into the how-to of developing your own SEO-friendly site structure.

A good site structure means a great user experience.

When you take away the colors, the fonts, the kerning, the graphics, the images, and the white space, good site design is really about a great structure.

The human mind craves cognitive equilibrium — being able to put pieces logically together, finding things where they’re expected, and locating what they are seeking. Thus, a strong and logical site structure is cognitively satisfying to users.

As you know, the more appealing your site to users, the more appealing it is to search engines, too. Google’s algorithm uses information from searchers to rank your site. If your site has poor CTRs and low dwell time, it will not perform well in the SERPs. By contrast, when a user finds a site that they like — i.e. a site with great structure — they don’t bounce and they stay longer. An accurate site structure can reduce bounce rate and improve dwell time, both of which will lead to improved rankings.

A good site structure provides your site with sitelinks.

Sitelinks are a listing format in the SERPs that show your site’s main page along with several internal links indented below. You’ve seen them before.

Sitelinks are a huge SEO advantage. They increase the navigability of your site, point users to the most relevant information, increase your brand’s reputation, improve user trust, help you dominate SERPs, increase clickthrough rate, and shorten the conversion funnel. Basically, sitelinks are awesome.

But how do you get sitelinks? You don’t simply go to Google Webmaster Tools and fill in a few fields on a form. You can’t issue a sitelink request. Instead, Google’s algorithm automatically awards websites with sitelinks. And they do so based on great site structure.

If you have a poor site structure, it’s very likely that your site will never receive site links. The absence of sitelinks could be costing your site more targeted traffic, higher CTR, and increased conversions.

A good structure means better crawling.

Web crawlers like Googlebot crawl a website’s structure. Their goal is to index the content in order to return it in search results. The better your site structure, the easier the crawlers can access and index the content.

Crawler’s don’t automatically discover everything on your website. Google even admits, “[there are] pages on your site we might not…discover,” or “URLs that may not be discoverable by Google’s normal crawling process.” (That’s one of the reasons why Sitemaps are necessary.) However, crawlers will have a far easier time accessing, crawling, indexing, and returning the pages of a site with strong structure.

A good site structure is at the very core of good SEO — optimizing for the crawlers.

To sum up, your site’s organization paves the way for SEO success. In fact, it could be argued, that without a good site structure, you will never have SEO success. Strong site structure gives your site an unbreakable SEO foundation that will provide you with vast amounts of organic search.

Six Steps to Creating Site Structure

Now, I’ll tell you how to create this kind of site structure.

1. Plan out a hierarchy before you develop your website.

If you’re starting a website from scratch, you’re in a great position to plan out site structure for the best SEO possible. Even before you start creating pages in a CMS, plan out your structure. You can do it on a whiteboard, a spreadsheet program (Excel, Google Drive Spreadsheets), most word processors, or something like Visio or OmniGraffle.

A “hierarchy” is nothing more than a way to organize your information — something that is simple and makes sense. Your hierarchy will also become your navigation and your URL structure, so everything important begins here.

Generally, a site hierarchy looks like this:

Image from http://moz.com/learn/seo/internal-link

There are a few features of hierarchy that you should keep in mind.

• Make your hierarchy logical. Don’t overthink or overcomplicate this process. You want simplicity, both for your own sake and for the ease of crawlers and users. Each main category should be unique and distinct. Each subcategory should somehow relate to the main category under which it is located.
• Keep the number of main categories between two and seven. Unless you’re Amazon.com, you don’t want to have too many main categories. There should be only a few main things. If you have more than seven, you may want to rethink the organization, and pare it down a bit.
• Try to balance the amount of subcategories within each category. Basically, try to keep it approximately even. If one main category has fourteen subcategories, while another main category has only three subcategories, this could become a little unbalanced.

A site hierarchy is the beginning point for a great site structure.

2. Create a URL structure that follows your navigation hierarchy.

The second main element in developing strong site structure is your URL structure. If you’ve logically thought through your hierarchy, this shouldn’t be too difficult. Your URL structure follows your hierarchy.

So, let’s say your hierarchy looks like this:

The URL structure for the Chinatown location would look like this:

www.kimsrestaurant.com/locations/chinatown

Your URL structure will be organized according to your site hierarchy. This means, obviously, that your URLs will have real words (not symbols) and appropriate keyword coverage.

3. Create your site navigation in HTML or CSS.

When you create your navigation, keep the coding simple. HTML and CSS are your safest approach. Coding in JavaScript, Flash, and Ajax will limit the crawler’s ability to cover your site’s well-thought out navigation and hierarchy.

4. Use a shallow depth navigation structure.

Your navigation structure will obviously follow your site hierarchy. Make sure that pages, especially important ones, aren’t buried too deep within the site. Shallow sites work better, both from a usability and crawler perspective, as noted in this Search Engine Journal article:

A shallow website (that is, one that requires three or fewer clicks to reach every page) is far more preferable than a deep website (which requires lengthy strings of clicks to see every page on your site).

5. Create a header that lists your main navigation pages.

Your top header should list out your main pages. That’s it. My website, Neilpatel.com uses a very simple top navigational header with three subcategories. This accomplishes everything I need.

Adding any other menu elements apart from your main categories can become distracting and unnecessary. If you’ve designed a parallax site, be sure to provide a persistent header menu that displays through each scrolling phase.

While dropdown menus using CSS effects or disappearing menus may provide a unique or intriguing user experience, they do not enhance SEO. I advise against them. I also advise against using an image-based navigational structure. Text links with appropriate anchors provide the strongest form of SEO.

If you have a footer with menu links, be sure to duplicate the main links of your top navigational menu in your footer navigation menu. Changing the order of links or adding additional category listing will complicate the user experience.

6. Develop a comprehensive internal linking structure.

Internal linking puts meat on the bones of a logical site hierarchy. Moz’s article on internal links lists three reasons why they are important:

• They allow users to navigate a website.
• They help establish information hierarchy for the given website.
• They help spread link juice (ranking power) around websites.

Each of these is directly tied to creating a tight-knit and well-integrated site structure.

There’s no need to get complicated with internal linking. The basic idea is that every page on your website should have some link to and some link from another page on the website. Your navigation should accomplish internal linking to the main categories and subcategory pages, but you should also make sure that leaf-level pages have internal linking as well.

Internal linking tells the search engines what pages are important, and how to get there. The more internal linking you have across all pages, the better.

Source - http://blog.kissmetrics.com/site-structure-enhance-seo

Top 15 Most Popular Business Websites

Here are the top 15 Most Popular Business Sites as derived from our eBizMBA Rank which is a continually updated average of each website's Alexa Global Traffic Rank, and U.S. Traffic Rank from both Compete and Quantcast."*#*" Denotes an estimate for sites with limited data.

Yahoo! Finance

110 - eBizMBA Rank | 75,000,000 - Estimated Unique Monthly Visitors | *50* - Compete Rank | *170* - Quantcast Rank | NA - Alexa Rank | August 1, 2014.
The Most Popular Business Websites | eBizMBA

Forbes

136 - eBizMBA Rank | 65,000,000 - Estimated Unique Monthly Visitors | 83 - Compete Rank | 165 - Quantcast Rank | 159 - Alexa Rank | August 1, 2014.
The Most Popular Business Websites | eBizMBA

MSN MoneyCentral

138 - eBizMBA Rank | 60,000,000 - Estimated Unique Monthly Visitors | *100* - Compete Rank | *175* - Quantcast Rank | NA - Alexa Rank | August 1, 2014. The Most Popular Business Websites | eBizMBA

CNN Money

148 - eBizMBA Rank | 58,000,000 - Estimated Unique Monthly Visitors | *250* - Compete Rank | *45* - Quantcast Rank | NA - Alexa Rank | August 1, 2014. The Most Popular Business Websites | eBizMBA

WSJ

204 - eBizMBA Rank | 42,000,000 - Estimated Unique Monthly Visitors | 221 - Compete Rank | 172 - Quantcast Rank | 219 - Alexa Rank | August 1, 2014.

The Most Popular Business Websites | eBizMBA

Google Finance

211 - eBizMBA Rank | 40,000,000 - Estimated Unique Monthly Visitors | **180** - Compete Rank | **241** - Quantcast Rank | NA -Alexa Rank | August 1, 2014. The Most Popular Business Websites | eBizMBA

Bloomberg

258 - eBizMBA Rank | 28,000,000 - Estimated Unique Monthly Visitors | 271 - Compete Rank | 161 - Quantcast Rank | 341 - Alexa Rank | August 1, 2014. The Most Popular Business Websites | eBizMBA

CNBC

383 - eBizMBA Rank | 27,000,000 - Estimated Unique Monthly Visitors | 312 - Compete Rank | 189 - Quantcast Rank | 649 - Alexa Rank | August 1, 2014.

The Most Popular Business Websites | eBizMBA

Fool

388 - eBizMBA Rank | 26,000,000 - Estimated Unique Monthly Visitors | 187 - Compete Rank | 141 - Quantcast Rank | 837 - Alexa Rank | August 1, 2014.

The Most Popular Business Websites | eBizMBA

BusinessInsider

415 - eBizMBA Rank | 23,500,000 - Estimated Unique Monthly Visitors | 314 - Compete Rank | 712 - Quantcast Rank | 218 - Alexa Rank | August 1, 2014.

The Most Popular Business Websites | eBizMBA

MarketWatch

428 - eBizMBA Rank | 19,000,000 - Estimated Unique Monthly Visitors | 437 - Compete Rank | *288* - Quantcast Rank | 560 - Alexa Rank | August 1, 2014.
The Most Popular Business Websites | eBizMBA

BusinessWeek

597 - eBizMBA Rank | 18,000,000 - Estimated Unique Monthly Visitors | 485 - Compete Rank | 450 - Quantcast Rank | 856 - Alexa Rank | August 1, 2014.

The Most Popular Business Websites | eBizMBA

FT

631 - eBizMBA Rank | 17,000,000 - Estimated Unique Monthly Visitors | 186 - Compete Rank | 632 - Quantcast Rank | 1,076 - Alexa Rank | August 1, 2014. The Most Popular Business Websites | eBizMBA

IBTimes.com


650 - eBizMBA Rank | 16,000,000 - Estimated Unique Monthly Visitors | 652 - Compete Rank | 112 - Quantcast Rank | 1,187 - Alexa Rank | August 1, 2014.
The Most Popular Business Websites | eBizMBA

SeekingAlpha


921 - eBizMBA Rank | 15,500,000 - Estimated Unique Monthly Visitors | 830 - Compete Rank | 1,035 - Quantcast Rank | 897 - Alexa Rank | August 1, 2014.
The Most Popular Business Websites | eBizMBA

Source - Most Popular Business Websites

SEO 101: How Important is Site Speed in 2014?

Even incredibly patient people can’t stand waiting in lines – whether that’s at the bank, airport, or pizzeria. We either get bored or angry that it’s taking longer than expected. In fact, businesses learn all about this in Queuing Theory – which uses data to determine if a business should hire more employees or add an additional elevator shaft.

This theory has more recently been used in analyzing web servers. Why? Because waiting for a website to load is no different from waiting in line for a delicious slice of pizza. We want that pizza now. And if it takes too long to get that slice, we’ll walk out the door and find somewhere else to eat. The same is true when surfing online. If a site takes too long to load, we’re outta there.

But, how important is site speed in 2014?

Google Has The Need For Speed

Image Source: Wikipedia

For starters, Google thinks site speed is important. Some would even go as far to say that Google has a bit of an obsession with how quickly a page loads.

Which isn’t exactly breaking news. Google has always rewarded sites that have clean codes and download quickly. This became particularly apparent when the Big G announced its Speed Online Tool in 2011.

From its Webmaster Central Blog, here’s a description of the tool:

At Google, we’re striving to make the whole web fast. As part of that effort, we’re launching a new web-based tool in Google Labs, Page Speed Online, which analyzes the performance of web pages and gives specific suggestions for making them faster. Page Speed Online is available from any browser, at any time. This allows website owners to get immediate access to Page Speed performance suggestions so they can make their pages faster.

But, why does Google care about site speed?

Former Vice President Marissa Mayer asked users if they preferred 10 or 30 results for Google searches. Obviously, web surfers went with the higher number, and Google made the changes.

The result? Traffic dropped by 20 percent on the pages that featured 30 results. Yet, the download speed difference between the pages with 10 and 30 results was only half a second – what an impact!

It should be noted that page speed is one of 200 or so signals Google uses to determine rank. In fact, as Moz has pointed out, page speed has affected less than one percent of search queries.

Keep in mind though, that page speed remains a ranking factor in Google’s algorithm for both desktop and mobile sites. John Ekman explains in an article on Unbounce that faster load times will indeed improve your ranking, as well as help you gain more organic traffic.

So while it’s just one of many factors in determining your site’s ranking, it’s certainly shouldn’t be ignored, especially since mobile sites can be penalized for loading slowly.

Site Speed Improves User Experience

Image Source: Wikipedia

Site speed will also improve the experience for visitors.

This should be common sense. After all, how many times have you left a website because it was taking forever to load? But, to convey just how important loading time is for users, here are some fascinating stats:

• According to a case study from Radware, 51 percent of online shoppers in the U.S claimed if a site is too slow they will not complete a purchase.
• Radware also discovered in another study that the demand for loading speed has increased over time. For example, in 2010 a page that took six seconds to load witnessed a -40 percent conversion hit. In 2014? That same loading time suffered -50 percent conversion hit.
• Research has found that 47 percent of web users expect a website to load in under two seconds.
  During peak traffic times, 75 percent consumers are willing to visit competitor sites instead of dealing with a slow loading page.
• Besides making visitors happy, having a website that loads quickly is good for business. In fact, Strange Loop has stated that just “a one second delay can cost you 7 percent of sales.”

In short, if you want people to hang around your site and make a purchase, it has to load in under two seconds. If not, people have no hesitation in jumping ship to another site.

What Causes Your Page to Load Slowly?

Image Source: veggiefrog/Flickr

There are a number of reasons why your web page is taking its sweet old time to load. And one of the first places to look is with your host.

Having the right host to fit your needs is a great business move, regardless. Remember, what you pay for is what you get. A cheap host may save you some money in the beginning, but it may not be reliable, which in turn will hurt your business in the long run. Make sure that you select a trusted host that can handle the needs of your business.

But what if you have a great host and are still having pages that load slowly? Here are some other common causes.

• Unoptimized Images: Unoptimized images actually impact 90% of the sites included in the Alexa 1000. These are usually PNG and JPEG images that have extra data included for comments or because they contain an inefficient DEFLATE compressor. PNG should be used for icons or logos, but JPEGs work better as photos.
• Widget/Plugin Overload: Sometimes the unsuspecting comment or social media buttons are to blame. For example, Matthew Ogborne discovered that the Facebook Like button was downloading 83 Kb of data at 1.34 seconds of load time.
• Incompatible Browsers, Plugins, and Apps: Take Flash as an example. It can seriously slow down a webpage. And it’s not even compatible with most mobile devices. Also consider browsers like Chrome don’t always play nice with plugins. Always test your site to see how fast your site is loading on different browsers and devices.
• Lots of Ads: No one likes tons of ads, but they can also slow down loading time. It only takes that one slow-loading ad to cause visitors to flee.
• Bulky Code: Whether it’s a code for analytics, sign up forms, affiliates, or inefficient HTML5/ CSS, they can all add up to make your site drag. Try to condense codes and shrinking files.
• Design Theme: While you want your site to look amazing, make sure you theme isn’t bringing your load time to a screeching halt.
• External Embedded Media: Media like videos or slide shows may be valuable content, but they can also slow down loading speed because the site they are hosted on may be having issues. Try to host content on your own server to boost speed.

Tools to Test and Improve Site Speed

Image Source: Leszek Leszczynski/Flickr

If you’re still having problems with site speed, or just curious to see how your page is doing in that area, there are plenty of free tools that can test the speed of your site. Here are ten tools that can test and help you improve the speed of your site (editor note: we have no affiliation with any of these listed, except for occasionally syndicating content by Yoast).

WebPageTest

This tool is supported by Google and allows you to run a free website speed test. It provides waterfall charts that break down content, check for Page Speed optimization, and make suggestions for improvements after receiving a page speed score out of 100.

Pagespeed Insights

This is a must-use tool from Google. Besides being easy-to-use, you’ll receive a page speed score out of 100 and analysis of both the desktop and mobile versions of your site. You get recommendations that are divided into high-, medium- or low-priority.

Google Analytics Plugin By Yoast

This is an essential plugin if you have WordPress for SEO purposes, plus it can also determine your load time across multiple browsers.

Yslow

This was designed by Yahoo! and has some pretty neat features like grades determined by predefined rule set or a user-defined rule set, suggestions for improvement, summary of components of the page, and performance analysis like Smush.it and JSLint.

Pingdom Website Speed Test

Probably the best feature about this tool is that it performs tests on browsers like Chrome, which better reflects real-world conditions. Another nice feature is that you can see how well your speed is measuring up to parameters set-up by Google Page Speed and Yslow.

GTMetrix

Your speed will receive two speed page grades from GTMetrix and Yslow, plus a charted history of page load times, analysis page sizes, and request counts.

P3 (Performance Plugin Profiler)

If you use WordPress, this is a plugin you shouldn’t miss. It examines which plugins are slowing down your site. Once this is installed you can even use it to test other speed-increasing plugins like Theme-Check.

Webpage Analyzer

Provides you with page size, composition, and download time. This tool also comes with a summary of page components with advice on how to improve page load time.

Load Impact

Unlike the other tools we’ve listed, Load Impact simulates a scenario where your page is flooded with users. This simulation will determine the areas where your site cracks, as well as how to fix any problems before they happen.

Page Speed Tool (Internet Marketing Ninjas)

Provides a complete analysis of page load time, how long it takes your page to load at different connection speeds, plus a report on external CSS, Javascript, and image files.

Source - SEO 101: How Important is Site Speed in 2014?