Speed for Rank: Utilizing Page Speed for Mobile Ranking

The digital age is booming and there doesn’t seem to be any sign of it slowing down or stopping.

Internet and technology are becoming an essential fixture in people’s lives. Every day, not one person refrains from using the internet or a piece of technology in this generation.

Furthermore, internet and technology keep on evolving in hopes that it will benefit the people. One of its evolution is improving its mobility and usability. From desktops and laptop, both can now be found in the palm of your hand through smartphones.

Due to its compact form and mobility, many people prefer the use of it when surfing the internet. They can be anywhere, anytime without losing connection from the virtual world.

It also shows that the population of mobile internet users keeps on growing where studies predict that 63.4% of the population is going to use mobile internet.

Google Announces Mobile-First Indexing

This exponential growth of internet users via mobile devices didn’t go unnoticed. Not even by Google.

In 2016, due to the demand of mobile internet, Google announced the implementation of Mobile-First Indexing. When this happens, Google will base the ranking of your website from the performance of the mobile version of your site.

Ever since the announcement, optimizing your mobile SEO is never absent in the SEO trends for the past year.

Moreover, many digital marketers and entrepreneurs are beginning to optimize and prepare their websites for the imminent update.

The Speed Update: Gradual Deployment of Mobile-First?

According to Google, their research shows that as more and more people are using mobile phones for their internet needs, they found that page speeds in mobile devices do matter.

People are using the internet to search for answers. And they wanted those answers fast.

Although page speed was already one of the ranking factors existing, it is only focused on desktop versions of the website. Recently, Google published an announcement where they are going to make loading speed of a page a ranking factor for mobile searches by July 2018.

The “Speed Update”, as they label it, will only affect the pages that give the slowest user experience. Additionally, it will only influence a small percentage of search queries.

The update disregards the kind of technology that was used when the page was created and is applied to all pages.

What Can You Do About It?

Content is Still King

Despite the importance of page speed, they also stated that the user intent is still an important factor.

If your site is slow as a turtle but you have great and relevant content on your side, you may still have a chance to rank high.

However, you’re not the only one that gets to produce quality and relevant content on the net. It won’t be long until someone with a fast loading website gets to create high-quality content and would attract more visitors.

Therefore, while you begin to prepare your site for the speed page update, you will have to create more excellent and relevant content.

This will stall you a bit of time before you get your own website optimized.

Tools You Can Utilize

Although there is no tool yet that can measure whether your page is affected by the new update, you can still do something about it.

There are a few tools that you can use to measure and improve your site’s performance.

Google’s Updated PageSpeed Insights. This tool provides you valuable information with regards to the performance of your website in terms of the speed of the page loads. Google has recently updated their PageSpeed Insights as well.

It now shows results that are based on the data from a real user from all over the world through Chrome User Experience Report. It also tells you your speed and optimization score on both mobile and desktop.

Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test. Unlike PageSpeed Insights, this tool measures how Googlebot sees your page rather than actual users. If you are looking to optimize your site for SEO purposes, you can use this tool.

Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test shows you if Google thinks your site is mobile-friendly or not. If your site does not pass the test, it will give you the details of the issues encountered and some suggestions on how to fix those errors.

Lighthouse. If you want to improve the quality of your web pages, you can use the tool Lighthouse. It has features such as doing audits for performance, accessibility, progressive web apps, and more.

After a series of audits, it provides you with a report on the status of your page. It will indicate the failed entries and also gives you a reference document that tells you the importance of audits and how to fix them.

Image Optimizing Tools

One of the factors that affect the loading speed of your page is large image or photo sizes. If you want to get your page to load faster, avoid the use of flash files. Not only that is slowing down your page load speed, but also some devices don’t support flash.

Your best course of action is to optimize your images using image compressors. There is more than one way a tool can reduce the file size of an image. Therefore, you can choose and pick a tool that works well for you.

Final Thoughts

With the Speed Update, it is not long until Google implements their Mobile-First Indexing.

The numbers don’t lie. With mobile internet users grow with each passing day, webmasters are really going to take mobile user experience into serious account.

As mentioned before, in this day and age, the shift of the internet in technology is moving at a dramatic pace. Mobile internet is just one of the changes that the industry poses to digital marketers and entrepreneurs.

There are plenty more of updates and changes that we will be undergoing. Therefore, it is never too early to prepare for the upcoming updates in the future.

By preparing for these changes ahead of time, it will save you the effort when the updates are launched. It also gives you an edge over the competition that will take you to success earlier.

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Al Gomez

SEO consultant Al Gomez is the man behind Dlinkers, a company dedicated to complete digital marketing services. With more than ten years of experience, he enjoys supporting smartpreneurs like himself to achieve online success.

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• Speed for Rank: Utilizing Page Speed for Mobile Ranking - February 2, 2018