Hitting the gas: Recent changes at Google make website speed an SEO priority
Published April 23, 2010
Digital marketing professionals could see big benefits from working with the technical staff in charge of their websites, now that Google has officially confirmed that it will take the speed at which websites load into account when calculating page rank.
The search giant announced earlier this month that "speeding up websites is important - not just to site owners, but to all internet users. Faster sites create happy users and we've seen in our internal studies that when a site responds slowly, visitors spend less time there. But faster sites don't just improve user experience; recent data shows that improving site speed also reduces operating costs."
This could mean that Google's changes will prompt extensive site redesigns and optimization from digital marketing departments, which can take advantage of several new website analytics tools that the company released at the same time as it announced the SEO changes. The "labs" tab in Google's webmaster tools will now provide a site performance indicator to help webmasters measure how quickly their pages are loading.