Today I share one of the secrets in my Search Profits book that I like to call Common Sense SEO.
Some people say that you optimize for Google and I’d like to suggest that you instead optimize for people.
Think about what it is that Google is looking for. Google wants to deliver the right results to peoples queries every time so people will keep using Google, right?
So for example lets take a look at a website that is slow to load. In traditional SEO, experts would tell you that the page needs to 128KB in size and load within 3 seconds for Google to be happy.
Now lets look at that from the human perspective. A lot of designers I know will design an awesome looking site but with no regard to how long it takes for the site to load. If they make it more efficient, they are taking away some cool feature or an important part of the awesome design.
But I ask you, are people going to patiently wait for the site to load while they are clicking through search results in Google?
The reality is that Google won’t be the factor that keeps the site from ranking well, it’ll be the people!
Everyone who doesn’t want to wait will ditch the site before it’s done loading and cause you to have a high bounce rate, which tells Google they don’t like you.
People just overcomplicate things.
So what is the fancy design worth? What is any of it worth if you cannot keep people on your site?
Wouldn’t you want to know as fast as possible if people didn’t want what you’re selling?