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How important page speed really is for SEO? (11)

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How important page speed really is for SEO?


Anyone who has engaged in some SEO related activity recently has heard about the page speed metrics when it comes to ranking your pages.

BUT, the info out there is quite mixed to say the least. There are people who claim you cannot rank ANYTHING with poor page speed scores.

On the other hand, there are people who would swear that page speed metrics are overrated and not that important, especially when it comes to the Core Web Vitals that so many pages still don’t pass.


So what’s the truth?


As always, it would sit somewhere in the middle.

You can definitely rank even with poor page speed metrics, but in case there is a competitor with comparable SEO optimization, backlink profile, quality content etc… but their page speed is better, they will most likely rank above you. Needless to say that this can be crucial in high competition niches and verticals.

But how much of an impact does it really have on the final rankings?

To be able to tell this with some level of certainty, one would have to conduct quite a complicated experiment that would take a LONG time and mess with the page speed on the go.

And as it often happens in life, I’ve done such an experiment… by accident


Let me share what I found out.


This relates to my cooking project, more info on that is here: https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...e-Let%92s-see-)
Just for the record, I’m using the standard Page Speed Insights from Google that they recommend: https://pagespeed.web.dev/
Whenever I mention a speed score it relates to MOBILE since that’s where the majority of my audience is.


- Long story short, at first I didn’t care about page speed metrics at all. I’ve simply put the blog together, I’ve done a bit of optimization, installed some caching plugin and that was it.
As a result, my page speed scores were about 40 for the main page and 15-30 for the actual blog posts, depending on how image heavy they were and whether I’ve embedded a video or not.

- Then, a few months later, I decided to dig deeper into this and quickly realized it’s something out of my area of expertise. Luckily, one STM member @quintyfresh) was willing to help me out and he actually did help a lot. Now the page speed scores were up to about 50.

- But I still couldn't pass the CWV so I decided to hire an Indian developer on Fiverr and that dude did some magic that has kicked the blog into the 90s and eventually the CWV passed too.

- The next thing I did was trying to install an Ad network as I wanted to see what kind of RPM I could get. Since I didn’t have enough traffic for the best networks I chose Ezoic for this test. Their weird setup requires that you basically route all the traffic through a proxy they control and they serve their own version of your blog with the Ads on it. As a result, my page speed scores dropped below 20 again.

- Their support wasn’t of much help and I didn’t want to stick with that so I dropped them after about a month or so.


Now let me post a screenshot from Ahrefs, which is a tool that tracks google rankings.


I’ve placed 5 arrows on it to highlight specific changes in the rankings. Each of those arrows marks a significant change, I will explain what happened where, right below the screen.



Arrows 1 and 2 are not related to the page speed scores. These two are related to another popular SEO theory that I kinda verified by accident too

Drop 1 and 2 happened when I stopped updating the blog for several weeks due to personal reasons. So yes, regular updates DO help your SEO rankings, you can clearly see it on the screen.

Arrow no.3 marks the time when @quintyfresh started to optimize the blog which resulted in an increase in page speed scores. As you can see, the growth in keywords I ranked for was rather steep.

Interesting fact: the final optimization by the Fiverr developer didn’t seem to have a big impact. This would signal that google has certain threshold and by passing that you are safe. In my example, it was around the page speed score of 50.

Arrow no.4 marks the integration with Ezoic Ad network. As you can see, the decline in keywords I ranked for was pretty much as steep as the previous growth. I basically lost the bigger parts of the freshly gained rankings within a few weeks.

Obviously, I didn’t like this one bit so I have dropped Ezoic. Literally a few days later, the drop has stopped! Arrow no.5 marks this point on the chart. Ever since my page speed scores returned to the 90s I started to gain new ranks quickly and it’s still ongoing.


Conclusion:


Page speed scores do matter and they matter a lot. I have improved them twice and in both cases it resulted in immediate growth in my rankings.

I have analyzed plenty of competitor websites and it really seems like you don't need to aim for the highest score, but in order to stay competitive you need to have page speed scores of 50-60 at least.

So, if you’re doing any SEO at all, definitely fix your page speed scores and CWV too, it can really be the breaking point.

Obviously, page speed is just one of the factors! The next thing I’m focusing on testing are backlinks… I already have some tests running, so will cover that in my next post.

Cheers,
Matej.

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thx, useful information

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Thanks @matuloo and @quintyfresh!



Amy

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@matuloo

It will all be worth it in the end! I am very happy my changes helped impact this site so much.

A funny thing about backlinks. I think you can disregard certain backlinks with google console now? In the old days we used to destroy people with scrapebox.

That is, scrapebox used to generate thousands of shitty backlinks for low cost. At first Google didn't care about them, and they worked okay. Then they released the entire zoo with updates. Panda, Penguin, 400lb gorilla body slam. Anyone using scrapebox links was basically delisted. Answer...

Scrapebox tons of times and enter your competitors website. You could drop anyone out of the ranking you didn't like lol. These days you can monitor in your console though and control which links Google gives you credit for. There was also an old SEO strategy called "seo siloing" which was a good strategy on how to control backlinks to push the juice with proper keywords where you want them. I am sure it still probably works like that.

I used to have a info graphic for it but I cant find it. Anyway good work matuloo as usual. Keep it up. You are building an asset now vs just campaigns. Asset building trumps everything else in the end.

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That is what happened to me.

I had a nice niche blog that was constantly growing in traffic. Also managed to get some of me keywords ranked in number 1 positions.

Then one day traffic dropped massively and didn't recover. Same happened to the ranking of my top keywords.

With the help of a SEO tool I found out that I had tons of really shitty backlinks. I asked Google to disregard them. It took a few weeks for everything to recover.

Seems like you constantly have to check if someone was shitting in front of your house and giving it a bad smell...

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Yup, it took a few months to see the full effect and how a decrease in page speed would basically erase all of it again, but now it really painted a clear picture To be honest, I didn't expect the effect would be this significant.

Yup, you can disavow links directly in the search console now, they have tool for that here: https://search.google.com/search-console/disavow-links
But Google changed the way they treat poor backlinks now, they tend to ignore those instead of penalizing for them, which is good

Would love to see the infographics in case you can find it!

Yes, that was one of the reasons I wanted to try and build something like this. I used to run plenty of websites in the past and somehow I wanted to give it another try to see if I can still make it

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When did this happen @larsometer ? Was that a while ago or was that a recent incident? It should be much harder to shoot someone's site down like this than it used to be.

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@matuloo: It was 2 years ago beginning of July.

Good to know that such tactics don't work that easily no more.

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Yup, I'm not sure when they have changed this policy, but should be way more safe now.

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Very userful info, thank you matuloo

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You're welcome! This project has been a lot of fun so far, I'm learning something new every single day... some experiments take months, some show results earlier... I will have a few more interesting findings to share soon enough

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