SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is about making it clear to both the search engines and the end user what the page is about.
You’ve got less than a second to make it extremely clear about what it is you are promising the user. So you need to focus all your energy on one statement: why the user is there.
Now is not the time to show the visitor all the options you have.
As the user begins to scroll you lose both the user and their attention decreases so the top of the page should focus on whats crucial and how it benefits the site visitor. Once you’ve made the one promise in the hero image, you do everything possible to deliver on it over the rest of the page.
Data suggests users scroll to deepen their understanding of a topic.
Users typically scan content. They do not generally read it. Users scan content in a completely linear fashion. To satisfy this user behavior, you should generally address only one topic per line of text.
It doesn’t really matter whether the user has actually read your content. What matters is that they have found the information they were looking for. And this means laying out the content in a way the user can anticipate what’s coming next.
It’s your job to steer their attention and behavior and help them find what they need. For instance, once users reach the end of a page, make sure that they don’t have to scroll all the way back up to the top of the page to continue their journey.
It's the websites job to actively shape the user’s journey. You must control the situation and influence the way the user experiences the website. You want to keep the user active and not lose them. To achieve this, you must create additional incentives that keep the user in the flow.
Because the space above the fold may be only the size of a business card, you must use it effectively to express the essence of the page. The better you do this, the faster visitors can orient themselves. They’ll decide for themselves whether they need or want more. When you structure a page, your goal should always be that users never see the end of the page. They should be able to accomplish their goal before that happens.
What’s important to remember is that scrolling is not a metric by which you can generally assess the performance of a Web site. It is merely an indicator of users’ commitment and their need for more information.
So your focus should be on defining a page’s or a site’s promise to the user.
And nothing matters more than web page speed.
Let’s say for every $100 you spend on ads you're getting 1 sale, to double your income you could spend $200 and get two sales or you could increase your conversions by just 1% and get the extra sale that way.
One way doubles your budget the other leaves everything the same.
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Amazon said for every 100ms improvement in load times they saw a 1% increase in Sales.
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Mobify said a 100 millisecond improvement in load times netted a 1.11% increase in sales.
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Walmart said a one second improvement increased conversions by 2%.
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BBC said they lost 10% of their total users for every additional second it took their pages to load.
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COOK reduced page loads by 850 milliseconds and saw a 7% increase in conversions.
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Furniture Village decreased load times by 20% and got a 10% increase in conversions.
By improving page speed by less than a second you could more than double your online sales.
So if you take a website that loads in 8.6 seconds (on mobile), which is the average website load time (on mobile). To start with you’ve got a Google penalty that is preventing Google from spidering your site or ranking it where it should be ranked.
Google added the ranking penalty when they studied their ad network and found that if a site takes just 3 seconds to load it will lose 53% of it's traffic and other tests have shown if a website takes 10 seconds to load it will lose 130% of its traffic.
Google also discovered that when their own site went from .3 seconds (to return a search result) to .5 second they saw a 20% drop in search traffic.
So doing nothing more than improving load times you could pretty much guarantee a 130% increase in leads coming from any website that takes 10 seconds or longer to load … if you could get them under a second.
Google also limits how deep and how often they spider a site if the first content paint isn’t in under a second.
Think about it … I go to YouTube and view a video with a product I want to buy. I’m in the zone, click a link and I’m on the website but while I’m waiting on the site to load I’m no longer in the zone. I might click once or twice but now I’m gone.
Speed affects how deep and how often Google spiders your site, which means you can write articles all day but Google will most likely never find them.
In addition to this you have a ranking penalty if your site takes longer than 2.5 seconds to fully load and you're losing over half your traffic if it isn’t fully loaded in under 3 seconds. And the average dealership website takes about 25 seconds to fully loaded and about 3 seconds for the first content paint.
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Page load times affect user experience
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Page load times affect search engine rankings
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Page load times affect spirdering
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Page load Times affect the Most Important parts of your website.
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User experience: Page load time directly impacts user experience. If your website takes too long to load, users may become frustrated and leave your site. A fast-loading website provides a better user experience, which can increase user engagement and satisfaction.
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Search engine optimization (SEO): Page load time is an important ranking factor for search engines. Google has stated that page load time is one of the factors it uses to determine search engine rankings. A slow-loading website can result in lower search engine rankings, which can lead to decreased visibility and traffic.
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Conversion rates: Page load time can also impact conversion rates. A slow-loading website can deter users from making a purchase or filling out a form, leading to decreased conversion rates. On the other hand, a fast-loading website can improve user trust, leading to higher conversion rates.