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Frightening News about Page Speed and Bounce Rate

/ Google, SEO practices, user experience / Leave a Comment

Page speed and bounce rate – a couple of definitions

  • Page speed: the time it takes to fully display the content on a specific web page.
  • Bounce rate: the percent of visits to a site that look at only one page.

Measure your page download speed and keep it under three seconds

How page speed and bounce rate are related

Impatience drives visitors to leave a web page that doesn’t display on their computer or phone as quickly as they want it to. That’s a bounce. The rule of thumb currently is that you begin to lose significant numbers of visitors when your page speed exceeds two seconds. Pingdom says:

… the average bounce rate for pages loading within 2 seconds is 9%. As soon as the page load time surpasses 3 seconds, the bounce rate soars, to 38% by the time it hits 5 seconds!

Graph showing the relationship between page speed and bounce rate
This graph illustrates the bad news. As page download time increases beyond 3 seconds, bounce rate increases dramatically.
A high bounce rate represents lost business.
If your goal is for visitors to take an action on your site, such as filling out an information form, contacting you, or buying something  — then bounces  represent lost customers.
But it’s actually worse than that.

Ranking factors on Google

It’s been well known and reported here that page speed is a ranking factor at Google. We began warning about it way back in 2009. All else being equal, a fast downloading page will outrank a slow page.
We’ve also pointed out that a high bounce rate is a negative ranking factor on Google as well.

Frightening fact: Slow web page speed drives up your bounce rate. We explain.

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Update June 2018: If your market is international, it may help to know what your page speed is overseas. I recommend a test at DotCom Tools that will test your page speed at over 20 international cities.
Update December, 2019:  Matthew Woodward in the UK has written a helpful guide you may find useful. 6x Free Ways To Increase Website Speed (and search traffic!)

Why it gets really bad

The frightening thing about all this is that these two negative ranking factors compound one another. It’s bad enough if you suffer a ranking penalty because your page is slow. But that slowness raises your bounce rate, resulting in a double-whammy to your ranking in Google search results.
Our recommendation is to work to make sure your pages all download within three seconds at the most. Two seconds is ideal, but three seconds is usually tolerable.

We always welcome your perspective. Let us know what you think in the comments section below.

We offer a free SEO review of your website, including page speed and many other factors. Call us and let’s set it up.

 

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Does Your Site Use Intrusive Interstitials? Better Not!

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Why you need to avoid intrusive interstitials

What’s an Interstitial?

An interstitial is an ad that appears in between two pages. Sometimes they can appear before the home page on your site. Often interstitials are pop-up ads, but sometimes they will be helpful, like an offer to chat with a live person. An interstitial ad is a form of interruption marketing used by advertisers who want their ads to be more like broadcast ads.
Many interstitials are just fine. But you want to be  sure your interstitials aren’t intrusive.
Examples of intrusive interstitial's that can generate a Google ranking penalty.

What’s wrong with an intrusive interstitial?

An intrusive interstitial or pop-up ad is one that annoyingly blocks all or most of a page. This is more problematic on mobile sites where there’s much less screen real estate. With less room on the screen it’s very easy for an interstitial to be considered intrusive.
One thing intrusive interstitials do is that they annoy your visitors. That’s a bad thing in and of itself, especially if it’s annoying enough to drive the visitor away. They also slow down the loading of your site because it’s extra material to download into a phone or browser.

You need to avoid intrusive interstitials on your website!

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Why is it important to avoid them?

It’s been well known for years that Google favors fast sites. If your interstitial is slowing down the display of your pages, that might hurt your ranking. But even beyond that, Google hates them. Google announced about a year and a half ago that at the beginning of 2017 intrusive interstitials would negatively affect your ranking. And here at  Rank Magic we are always concerned about the health of your rankings.

A few exceptions

Google has identified three types of interstitials that “would not be affected by the new signal” if “used responsibly.”

  • Interstitials that appear to be in response to a legal obligation, such as for cookie usage or for age verification.
  • Login dialogs on sites where content is not publicly indexable. For example, this would include private content such as email or unindexable content that is behind a paywall.
  • Banners that use a reasonable amount of screen space and are easily dismissible. For example, the app-install banners provided by Safari and Chrome are examples of banners that use a reasonable amount of screen space.

Please join the conversation and share your observations in the Comments section below.

If you’re struggling with your online visibility, please call us. Because at Rank Magic, we can fix that!

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Is It Time to Abandon Flash?

/ browsers, page content, SEO practices, user experience, web design / Leave a Comment

It's time to abandon flash content on your site.Do you really need to get rid of flash on your site?

[There’s an update below as of May, 2020]
I’ve written about the demise of Flash in this blog as long as 10 years ago. It’s been a slow process, but it looks like it’s finally on its death bed.

The news is not good.

Recent news about the Adobe Flash platform for audio and video web content is not good. Google says it’s working hard to “make sure the web is ready to be Flash-free.” Already by default Flash doesn’t work on mobile or Chrome and having it on your site may be a negative ranking factor as a result.
Flash is undeniably on the way out. Adobe will stop supporting Flash at the end of 2020. According to Mozilla in July,

This morning, Adobe announced its roadmap to stop supporting Flash at the end of 2020. Working with Adobe and other browser vendors, Mozilla has prepared a roadmap for Flash support in Firefox, and guides for site authors to make their final transition away from Flash technology.

Bolstering that, Microsoft wrote an article entitled “The End of an Era – Next Steps for Adobe Flash”, saying

We will phase out Flash from Microsoft Edge and Internet Explorer, culminating in the removal of Flash from Windows entirely by the end of 2020.

Still using Flash on your website? Read this!

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Does that mean we have until 2020 to remove Flash content?

Ominously, The Verge predicts

Google is making HTML5 the preferred and default way to display website content in a change that’ll take place over the next couple of months. This means that unless a website has an HTML5 content player, video content will not automatically display. All Flash content will be blocked, unless users manually enable it on a site-by-site basis. [Emphasis added]

HTML5 is the new standard for video content on websites.Adobe has reportedly ceased development of Flash for all mobile devices, so industry watchers like LifeWire agree that it’s close to 100% certain that Flash will never be available on the iPhone. If you want your audio, video or animations to work on an iPhone, Flash is out of the question.
The Google Play store isn’t supporting Flash for Android devices. That means that if you install a Flash player from elsewhere for your phone you won’t be able to get any bug fixes or updates .
And as if to put a final nail in the coffin, Forbes has a recent article entitled “The Death Of Adobe Flash Is Long Overdue”.

Where to now?

If you have Flash content on your site, it’s time to ask your webmaster about converting it to HTML5.
[Update: Mozilla plans to drop Flash support in Firefox 84 (December 2020)]

If you’ve made that transition on your own site, please share your experience with us in the comments below.

 

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Page Speed for Google Rankings and Conversions

/ Google, user experience / 4 Comments

Page Speed Affects Your Search Rankings and Conversions

Take a stopwatch to your page download speeds.
When it comes to your website slow speed kills rankings and conversions.

What is Page Speed?

Page speed refers to how quickly a page on your website downloads into a visitor’s browser or phone. It can be measured a few ways. Google and some other sources report a score for your speed on a scale of 0-100. Others display it in seconds.

You can measure page speed a few ways:

  • Time to First Byte (how long it takes for your browser to receive the first byte from the web server
  • Page Load Time (how long it takes to fully display the page)
  • Above the Fold Time (how long it takes to fully display as much as you can see without scrolling down)

However you measure it, faster is always better.

However you measure it, the faster your web pages load for a visitor, the better.

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Page Speed and Google

I’ve written before about how a slow page speed can hurt your rankings in search results. Google has explicitly stated that how quickly a site loads into a browser is now a ranking factor. All other things being equal, a faster site will outrank a slower site.
Google  scores your site separately for download to a desktop/laptop computer and for a phone. It’s quite common for those to get very different download speed scores. And mobile speeds are usually slower than desktop speeds.

Mobile Speed is Increasingly Important

Google is moving toward a mobile-first index, which means that the information they know about your website comes from the mobile version of your site,  not the desktop version.  Those two may be the same for a responsive site, but some websites actually have differing amounts of information between the two, usually with the mobile speed being slower. Since Google is now focusing on the mobile version of your website, it stands to reason that the page speed it measures on a phone is more important than the speed it measures for a desktop/laptop computer.

Google really cares how fast your web pages display on a phone. We explain.

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Page Speed and Your Visitors

A visitor snoozes while waiting for a slow page to load.
Don’t test your visitors’ patience or put them to sleep with slow page speed.
There’s another equally important reason to pay attention to your download speed: visitors. We are all increasingly  stressed over time and as a result have less patience for watching a slow web page load in our computer. If your page is too slow, visitors may leave before the page ever loads for them. If they find you in search, become impatient and immediately go back to the search results to select something else, Google makes note of that as a black mark against your page. That will negatively affect your  rankings moving forward.
Needless to say, the more people who abandon your website, the fewer conversions (converting visitors to paying customers) you will see.
Compared to a page with a two-second page speed, one that takes six seconds can expect to lose 25% of its visitors to abandonment.
page speed related page abandonment percentages
Abandonment rates as a result of slow page speed
Several years ago, Forbes reported

A 1-second delay in page load time equals 11% fewer page views, a 16% decrease in customer satisfaction, and 7% loss in conversions.

Assessing Your Page Speed

There are several tools you can use to assess whether your page downloads quickly enough.

Each of these measures and scores differently. You’ll get the best idea of your page speed by running and evaluating all of them.

Fixing Your Page Speed

How to fix a slow page is beyond the scope of this discussion. It’s technical enough that most small business owners aren’t equipped to attempt it. This is something best left to your webmaster.
If you’d like an idea of what’s likely to be involved, the folks at Moz list the main factors at play in this overview.
Update 12/3/2019: I’ve just found a very nice overview of how to increase your page speed written by Anna Foster at Top 10 Website Hosting in the UK.
Update 12/30/2019:  Matthew Woodward in the UK has also written a helpful guide you may find useful. 6x Free Ways To Increase Website Speed (and search traffic!)
Update 7/21/2020: Now that mobile searches comprise more than half of all Google searches, your site’s mobile page speed is more important than ever. The folks at Hosting Ninja have a somewhat technical article, but if you’re struggling with slow loading of your site you might consider sharing this with your web designer. 10 Ways to Improve Mobile Page Speed

This is just one of many factors that affect your online visibility when people search for what you do. We can help with the full array of optimization factors. Contact us for a free SEO consultation.

How has your experience been, wrestling with your site speed issues? We’re interested in your perspective: please comment below.

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Get Rid of a Bad Online Review (Infographic)

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Ron Dod of Visiture designed the infographic below to deal with bad reviews on Google. It applies equally to a bad online review on other sites as well, like Facebook and Yelp.
This infographic is a companion to our blog post How to Get Rid of a Bad Online Review.
Infographic on how to get rid of a bad online review.

Online reputation management can be a daunting prospect to deal with on your own. We can help! Ask me about our PowerListings Ultimate service that can help generate positive reviews and focus them where you want, even on your own website.

Think we can benefit with your experience with bad online reviews? Please share in the comments below.

Think others can benefit from the informatio here? Please share it with the buttons on the left. Or give us a +1 or a Like at the top of the page.