Google has spent years making user signaling a factor in search ranking. Each update of the search engine’s algorithm, starting with using links (bibliometrics) as a signal in the first version of Google, has made human behavior a ranking factor. Now, speed and interaction with the search results are becoming nearly as important as inbound links.
In recent years, a website’s speed has started to act like a kind of kill switch, particularly on mobile. If you have a slow load speed or are otherwise difficult to crawl on mobile, no amount of links will overcome that. That’s why SEO experts are now pushing for speed as much as the UX teams.
But many companies are still selling tools to solve marketing and conversion “problems” that harm speed, user experience, and therefore SEO. It may seem like a good idea to embed your Instagram feed and a live chat app on your companies website footer, but doing so can quickly add seconds to your page load time on mobile over 4g. That loss of speed may just add insult to injury if a company doesn’t respond to its live chat.
“Shot with a Kodak Ektra smart phone” by Thomas Leuthard is marked with CC BY 2.0.
A small town girl living in a robots world. But these robots only exist online and don’t look like Gabriel Luna. I cover things relating to AI and cybersecurity, topics that are increasingly converging.
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