Are you familiar with this scenario? You enter a search term into Google, get a list of hits, click on the top two or three URLs to open in new tabs and click along your browser to see the results. Next thing you’re hit with is a website that has nothing but text. That’s weird?! Oh there we go… the images have started to load and the website stutters into life.
It’s not an uncommon scenario, however thanks to Google it’s a scenario that we should be experiencing less and less. Google is on a mission to improve the end user experience and in the process is forcing everyone to create better, more efficient websites. So if a website is taking more than a few milliseconds to load (and it’s not the fault of your Internet provider) then you can expect to see your website slip down the rankings.
Why page load speed? As the old adage goes – “An image speaks a 1000 words!” Which is perhaps one reason why images are taking a prevalent role in modern website with parallax scrolling websites leading the way. Therefore the page load speed of a website is an important ranking factor and for B2B businesses, it is set to get more important as they constantly strive for improved search rankings.
How do you improve page load speed?
Search engines across the world – Google, Yahoo, Bing, Baidu – have the sole mission to index those webpages that are most relevant to certain terms, this is SEO 101! For B2B businesses the objective of their SEO team or consultancy should be to continually refine and improve the website so that it ranks higher for keyword search terms, therefore the potential of an interested visitor finding their website is increased, this is B2B SEO 101!
There is a number of SEO edits you can apply to your website right away – optimising URLs, improve Meta Tags, H1 Headers, improve social signals, external links – the list goes on. However with Google’s current mission to improve page load speed, now is the time to focus on the images that you have on your website and determine whether they are impacting your ranking performance.
