Users/searchers should have a seamless experience on your website. To highlight how important the user experience is to Google, here’s a quote from John Meuller, who is the head webmaster trends analyst at Google:

 

“I see lots and lots of SEO blogs talking about user experience, which I think is a great thing to focus on as well. Because that essentially focuses on what we are trying to look at. We want to rank content that is useful for them (Google Search users) and if your content is really useful for them, then we want to rank it.”

 

The main takeaway is that Google values the user experience. So, how do you go about improving the user experience on your website? It all starts with technical SEO. And, there are two parts to technical SEO that you need to understand:

  1. There are high-impact technical issues, and
  2. There are low-impact technical issues.

 

According to HubSpot, a 1-second delay in website loading speed can reduce conversions by 7%. Increasing your website loading speed, however, can increase conversions. Mozilla Firefox reduced their average loading time by 2,2 seconds, which increased their downloads by 15,4%. That is a massive increase for a website like Firefox, which gets a ton of downloads already.

 

At the very minimum, you should get your website’s loading speed to 3 seconds or less. The first thing you should do is benchmark your site’s loading speed. You can go to tools.pingdom.com and enter your URL. It is a good idea to run your site through Pingdom from at least three different locations so that you can get an average loading speed.

 

There are countless resources online on how to improve your website’s loading speed. But, if there is one thing that determines how quickly your website loads, it is your web hosting. You can make all kinds of micro changes to try to improve your website’s loading speed, but nothing will make a bigger difference than your web host.

 

Most of the people who follow this blog have already mastered other areas of SEO, such as link-building, on-page and off-page optimization and they have implemented a responsive web design. It’s time to start focusing on the user experience. Contact The Digital Marketing People for small business marketing today.