Optimizing page speed in Local SEO

When it comes to SEO page speed is a factor in how Google ranks you in search results, but with Local SEO page speed really comes to play depending on your competition.  If your site is really slow, though, that is going to hurt you regardless. But if it feels really quick for you the only disadvantage is if your competitors or even other businesses in the similar industry are serving their site up significantly faster. Basically, Google is going to check the speed in which your site loads and that site load is going to factor everything like style sheets, images and any external requests that are made by your website to other sites such as Facebook or Twitter. And what it does is it takes those results and compares that to your neighborhood of websites and then if you are ranking average or above average on that baseline there is probably not a penalty. But if you are an outlier and you are pretty slow compared to other neighborhood you are going to see a decrease in rank. Another thing that Google does is checking the user experience. It can determine if your user experience is good and that is things like what content is above the fold. How big your buttons are on mobile, if the site is responsive and so on. Focusing on user experience will impact your SEO and that’s because Google wants to drive traffic to sites that users stay on. And visitors tend to stay on sites that are built around their needs and how they want to navigate the web. Now I am a big fan of making things better any chance I get. The better I can make it for Google the better it is for my users and the better I tend to expect the outcomes.  With page speed and user experience it’s worth to get above average because as the landscape changes and as your competitors advance in their technology, it’s great to be ahead of the curve. So, there is a lot that goes into the page speed and most of it is fairly technical. In these days mobile is becoming more and more popular. So, it’s really important that you also focus on your mobile experience. You do want your site to load quickly for your users. So, take a look at the programs to identify the errors that will have the biggest impact on your speed and then come back and fix them to get a better overall rank for your site.