Does Page Load Time Affect SEO Rankings?
-
I was curious about how much page load times affect rankings. Here's what I did:
- I put together a lot of interactive media on specific landing pages
- Time-on-Page from organic visitors went from 50 seconds to average of 34 minutes
- Bounce Rate decreased by 20%
- Page Load time increased from 1 second to 6 seconds and at peak times to 8 seconds (on 56KB test)
- In the meantime the page was re-indexed and re-cached
My question is three-fold:
- Would the time on page give higher rankings for keyword
- Would decreased bounce rate enhance rankings?
- Would the page load time decrease rankings?
Did anyone do a similar test? What were the results?
-
20% is repeat traffic. 80% is new. In past 2 weeks impressions increased around 30-35% and the only thing I can attribute the change to is the interactive stuff.
I have what you may call a niche market. All the competitors out there are focusing on selling products, we're offering a service on top of education. In many cases we're sharing the stuff the product companies would never want clients to know.
But it doesn't hurt to be prepared once other competitors arise, and I'm sure they're coming.
It would be good to find out about the correlation of Time on Page vs. Rankings from others that have tested this.
I'll be sure to post an update in a couple of weeks.
-
To add to Christy's well written and quite accurate response, page load time has been a key factor since Panda first rolled out. It may have been a factor before this, however Panda is when it first really took hold as a clear, change = results measure. For example, I have had numerous audit clients who had severe page load problems, and several of those have seen increased rankings and resulting traffic from organic listings solely by resolving page load speed.
In one client situation, simply by changing site templates (and resulting load speeds), the client saw a doubling of organic traffic literally overnight. To then test that this was the cause, he then did the same thing with a completely different site that had a completely different model and also saw traffic dramatically increase literally overnight.
However, given the complexity of SEO in 2012, with so many other factors, if there are other serious flaws to the SEO, just increasing page load speeds may not get the same results I've described.
Bounce rates CAN negatively impact rankings, but not purely as a stand-alone factor. It's when someone comes to your site, can't find what they're looking for, then returns to Google and then clicks to another site and does not then come back to Google. Which is also the case even if they didn't initially bounce on first landing on your site. They could also have spent more time, or visited more pages before returning to Google to re-search.
-
Yes, page load time is a ranking factor. Optimizing pages so they load quickly is listed as a best practice in Google's Webmaster Guidelines. So yes, increased page load load time may decrease rankings. It should definitely decrease traffic. Eight seconds is a looong time these days to wait for a page to load! Have you seen any changes in the SERPs since making these changes?
On the positive side, you must have some fantastic content if users are willing to wait that long for a page to load -- and stay on it for over half an hour I am curious, are you having a lot of repeat traffic?
No, bounce rates do not affect rankings. Matt Cutts has said that if a user visits only one page on a site and finds the information they need, this is a positive user experience. High bounce rates aren't positive for every site, don't get me wrong. If you have an ecommerce site for shoes and you have a very high bounce rate, meaning customers aren't browsing your offerings, writing reviews, and going through checkout, you aren't likely selling very many shoes on the site. The bounce rate is measured in GA to give you the information you need to analyze your site performance in this regard, not for the purpose of ranking your site.
Increased time on page correlates with increased user engagement. Users engage with, and engage longer, with quality content. Or at least highly entertaining content While it is not as clear-cut as to weather this is a ranking factor as is the case for page load time, Google is measuring it and they are all about rewarding websites that provide a great user experience, right?
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
In a pickle. SEO for Personal Brand, Book or Keywords?
I'm getting ready to take on a new client for SEO, but she is having a hard time understanding I'd like to rank her for "Her" and her new book, rather than keywords for her ambiguous keywords which show very little to no search volume from Keyword Planner data. Her website and domain name are only 4 months old Her book launches sometime in December (most likely January 2016) Her services (she's a consultant) provide little keyword volume She is persuaded she needs to rank for her service keywords I feel strongly we need to get her name, her method/approach and her book optimized She is seemingly difficult to work with, but once I build trust in SEO for her, so will be a great, long client Her consulting services are based on Change and Transition for wealthy individuals going through career change, divorce, pay increase, pay decrease, depression, children, etc... targeting Executives, C-Level Execs In this situation, what would you all do? How would this website or person even be optimized? Blog articles? Press releases? Guest blogging? Video blogs? Podcasts? It's a tricky one and hoping the Moz community can lend some ideas as this type of SEO would be new for me, yet I'm up for the challenge! Thank you in advance and look forward to your replies! - Patrick
Search Behavior | | WhiteboardCreations0 -
A Sudden Drop in Keyword Ranking but why?
Hi, I wondered if anyone has ever experienced anything like this before, one of our customers has a website JDB Events (http://www.jdb-events.com/). When he first came to us he was using Fast Hosts and he was experiencing down time pretty much every day in periods of up to an hour. The first step before carrying out any SEO was to place the website on our VPS so that the downtime issue was resolved. It did resolve the issue and the speed of the website was also increased. My next issue was to address the length of the Title on the home page because it was 157 characters, I usually keep these to 70 characters. This is the old Meta Title: JDB Events Limited - Event, Production & AV Hire Specialists | The West Midlands Dance Floor Hire, LED Furniture, DJ, Disco Hire & Event Services Specialists Here is the my new Meta Title: JDB Events | LED Furniture Hire for Parties and Corporate Events I have attached a screenshot of the drop that I have experienced, would anyone recommend that it's ok to keep the title longer so that I can cram more search terms into it, I use Woo Rank as a bench mark and this recommends shortening the title but I would be interested in hearing anyone's views. Other steps that I have taken: Shortened the home page description WWW Resolve Added Robots.txt Crawled all of the pages for 404 errors etc The next step I'm thinking of taking is replacing the amended meta title and description for the old one and monitoring that, other than that I can't see why I have taken such a hit. Thanks NewServerSpeedTest.png OldServerSpeedTest.png Rankings.png
Search Behavior | | chrissmithps0 -
Does the title attribute affect CTR?
I've been trying to find some research or studies regarding the title attribute on links and if it affects CTR or perhaps another benefit to using it. I know that it's not a factor in search engines and there's some problems with the compatibility of it in various devices and browsers, but looking for any stats that show using could affect your CTR. Would love some actual studies versus opinions, but haven't found any.
Search Behavior | | benmarshall1 -
How come some local 7 pack listings link to site and some link to the G+ page?
Does anyone know how to fix this issue? Even though a site profile has had the website added to it Google continues to link the main "title tag" link to the G+ page and not the actual website domain. Thanks for any info in advance! https://www.google.com/#sclient=psy-ab&q=dog+sitting+in+rockaway&oq=dog+sitting+in+rockaway&gs_l=hp.3..0i22i30l4.14871.16189.1.16397.8.8.0.0.0.0.296.2042.2-7.7.0...0.0...1c.1.15.psy-ab.Y1db0jo77V0&pbx=1&bav=on.2,or.r_cp.r_qf.&bvm=bv.47244034,d.bmk&fp=722b460c2153b7be&biw=1920&bih=910
Search Behavior | | irvingw0 -
How to approach SEO for a large site that doesn't have specific keyword goals?
So, I have a project that has 10,000+ page of unique editorial content in a specific industry. They currently get about 500,000 pageviews a month and average just under 2 pages per visit. It has a 66 domain authority and has been doing "the basics" for SEO for about 7 years (headline is an H1, URL is custom while the headline is more "reader friendly", description is a snippet of the body copy a little into the first paragraph, nofollow in the comments). The crux is that it's an editorial publication so they're not targeting specific keywords, but a wide swath of keywords. Would it be best to just dive in and figure out some of the less competitive keywords for some of the articles that they could tailor some content to rank better for, then just move onto more and more? What are some ways to approach this if they just want to raise their general traffic and relevancy to the next level?
Search Behavior | | jpea0 -
Will creating sub folders for foreign versions of the website, remove rank juice from the main site?
Hi, We plan to create sub-folders for our german, spanish and italian language versions. If we do will this pass rank juice to the new sites, but at the same time badly effect our main site, regards link juice/serp? Or is this not such a huge factor in people's experience? Many thanks. James.
Search Behavior | | Quime1 -
Why does my website not rank better for the keyword i am going for?
My website is www.canadafloraldelivery.com. I just can't seem to get my webpage ranked well for the keyword " Flowers Edmonton " . Also I can't seem to get my Google local listing on the map for many keywords. Is there something obvious that I am missing? Any help would be very appreciated.
Search Behavior | | CKerr0