Page Speed Optimization Boosts Organic Rankings Case Study

With every client I work with,  I start the project with an in-depth site audit. After the assessment, I hand it to my clients and explain how their website’s overall health is doing and what needs to get fixed.

The website analysis report has detailed sections showing where the website is failing and the suggestions needed to get them fixed. So, this website has issues in the following areas:

• Content — the website has over 600 articles of which 400+ of them has the same or almost the same topic. So I recommended to reevaluate all posts and merge the ones that talk about the same topic. There are also posts and pages that have very little to no content. So, my recommendation is to remove them.
• User Experience — with a bounce rate of 90%, clearly the website has terrible UX accompanied by its slow site speeds. That’s why I recommended to redesign it with conversion in mind. The blog posts are also causing the site’s high overall bounce rate, so I suggested to get it revamped as well.
• E-A-T (Expertise, Authority and Trustworthiness) — although the website has good authority, it lacks expertise and trustworthiness. The authorship is missing and thus trustworthiness is low. So, I suggested that they create the needed elements to make the A and T good.
• Backlinks — the site has around 14,000 plus links and about 50% of them are low quality, toxic and spammy. So, I filed a disavow.
• Google My Business — the business’ GMB listings were not properly optimized and were outdated. This website has about 13 GMB listings that need to get optimized and upated.
• Other Business Citations — the business’ was also listed on major listings such as Yelp, Yahoo Local, Bing, etc that need updated.
• Page Speed — the website has a low overall speed on both desktop and mobile. Its individual pages are also slow. I showed this one page by page (all important pages) with competitor comparison to my client, and they were shocked about their website’s performance.

After pinpointing the issues, my client started doing the recommended actions. They started fixing the content, then user experience, E-A-T, backlinks, Google My Business, and lastly, the other business citations.

You must be thinking, “Wait John, you missed something.”

I know. That’s the sad part. They did not optimize for page speed! Not until the second half of February of 2019.

The reason for this though is that their web development team is too busy with other marketing materials that are way too important for the company at that time.

Fast forward, when the development team finally fixed the page speed issue, a significant recovery in both organic keyword rankings and traffic can be seen.