Points to ponder on the performance of your website

I was talking to Matt from Nett Magazine yesterday at an online marketing session he ran in Brisbane yesterday.

Although it was aimed at a retail-level (i.e. non-geek) audience, I gleaned a couple of interesting points out of it. And a couple of those useful pieces of information are what I want to share with you now.

The first one was something I was already aware of, but as it has only been 'officially' announced recently, it is definitely worth mentioning. It has to do with one of the signals that Google uses in determining search result rankings - page speed. While this isn't surprising to anyone who practices SEO, it does mean that if the performance of your web pages are poor - that is they load slowly - you may suffer in the search result rankings.

This means that ensuring you have suitable web hosting, a well coded site, and optimised content (particularly images, audio and video) are all exercises worth reviewing.

As Google point out in their blog post linked to above, this isn't a major part of their algorithm:

While site speed is a new signal, it doesn't carry as much weight as the relevance of a page. Currently, fewer than 1% of search queries are affected by the site speed signal in our implementation…

Rather, like other factors, it is just one of many factors to consider. But if you're in a competitive search market, paying attention to your websites performance could make the critical difference in the results you get. If you want to know how to go about solving this problem, check out the tools on the blog post linked to above, or leave a comment below.

The second point I wanted to share was the concept Matt raised of bounce rates having an effect on search results.

I have to admit this was new to me. I've been aware for some time that Poor bounce rates can adversely affect Adwords, or Google PPC, campaigns. But the notion that it had an effect on organic search results was new to me.

To be honest, I thought he might have had it all a bit confused. But after taking a look around on the web, I found this article on Bounce Rates, CTR, and Conversion Rates.

It seems that Matt was on to something! Better yet, I'm increasing my knowledge. Thanks Matt!

The article, written by Jeremy Chatfield, shows that largely because of their online ad network, Google certainly have the means to track Bounce Rates. And he eloquently argues that Google are likely to give this signal some weight as it is in their users interests to find information that is generally found to be interesting (i.e. not something most other people navigate away from).

Once again, according to Jeremy, this signal of user behavior is unlikely to make a major difference, but is probably does make some difference, especially in competitive situations. As he says:

The largest impact of user behavior is that we get to keep our position, or maybe even slide up a position or two.

The question you might be asking yourself now is, "How on Earth do I monitor Bounce Rates, CTR & Conversion Rates?"

Good question! If you're not already using Google Analytics, check it out. It does a good job in most situations of measuring these important statistics. Of course, you can always get help from any reputable web designer, including me!

I hope this has been informative. Please leave a comment below if you've got any questions, or experiences to share.

Comments

Stephen Hamilton

Jun 17, 2010 at 10:08 AM

Thanks for commenting Darren. Sorry about your comment being stuck in 'moderation limbo'. But now it is out to see the light of day! Yes, I thought that point about bounce rates was very interesting, as I hadn't realised it myself.

Darren Flood

Apr 23, 2010 at 10:41 AM

Interesting news about the bounce rates. I didn't realise it effected adwords in that way. Seemingly, everything comes down to a numbers game. I will be looking at my Google Analytics results later today. Thanks for the tips.