SEO On-Air: Importance of Page Speed and User Experience in SEO

In this episode, we cover:

Today, we speak to Garry Grant, the CEO of SEO Inc., a San Diego internet marketing agency. For over 20 years, he has improved rankings and integrated custom SEO services for businesses of all sizes.

In this episode, Garry will discuss the importance of page speed and user experience in SEO.

Stay tuned for the next podcast episode, where our guest, Francois Goub, discusses the importance of indexability and crawlability.

Show Notes Explanation

Hello everyone, this is Senthil. Welcome to another episode SEO On-Air. Speed has become the main game for SEO these days, it’s not just a ranking signal, but also helps you to give the best user experience. To talk on this topic we have with us today Mr Garry Grant, the CEO of SEO Inc. It is one of the top marketing agencies in San Diego. Let’s begin with the questions.

Time Stamp: 01:19-11:45

Q. Can you give us an idea of how important it is for an SEO executive to learn and implement the speed optimization strategies?

• Page Speed will be at the top of the list in technical SEO for the coming years
• Page Speed Insights is a great tool to analyze a site’s page speed. It gives you the page speed score.
•  However, it is not the only tool that one must rely on
• Therefore, some other tools that can be used by webmasters are Pingdom, GTMetrix, and webpagetest.org site

Time Stamp: 12:27-16:49

Q. What are the alternates for lead generation software like OptinMonster?

• We use HubSpot, and we use Amazon web server for images and videos
• We use CloudFlare for Web Application Firewall (WAF) to stand in front of your server
• Then we use their CDN portion and define rules in that CDN to minify Javascript and do lossy or lossless compressions

Time Stamp: 18:43-24:13

Q. Do you have any tips in handling render-blocking Javascript and CSS that slows down sites?

• The first thing you can do is to minify them
• You can defer non-central script
• You could have in-line scripts using the Chrome Dev tools
• Minimize the use of Polyfills
• You can use Babel to get the scripts to load faster

Time Stamp: 26:35-29:13

Q. Caching doesn’t really help in improving the web vitals score? What’s your take on it?

• You could use some caching plugins to make your site faster
• There’s a plugin for WPRocket for WordPress, which is a tool that makes your site load faster
• But, by using WPRocket and CoreVitals, you are not going to get the web vitals to an acceptable level

Time Stamp: 32:00-35:24

Are there any quick wins that you can suggest to new site users about their core web vitals?

• You can disable the unnecessary apps and see if there’s an improvement
• Talk to experts and reach out to them for advice on improving your core web vitals