I saw a survey the other day in an SEO group that said what's more important
- Quality Content
- Backlinks
- Mobile-First Indexing
- Page Load Speed
The question is like what came first, the chicken or the egg?
People want to say what's more important, It’s not so simple as to say one thing matters more than another.
Does a website need to be W3C valid?
What's more important on a car, the engine, brakes, or transmission?
The majority of the SEO’s said quality content and well…that's just stupid. Quality content is like saying you need a good looking car, wife, dog or whatever because the quality is subjective to the knowledge, views, and understanding of the end user.
You can have the best content in the world but if an error prevents the website from working correctly then it doesn’t matter.
If the website takes just 3 seconds to load according to studies conducted by Google it will lose 53%, over half its traffic. What good does quality content do if over half the users are leaving before they ever get to the content?
If a web page doesn’t have the first content paint in under a second it can prevent Google from ever finding the content, ranking it, or the potential client from ever seeing it.
And if the most important part of being mobile friendly is page speed then how can you even be mobile friendly if you're not fully loaded in under a second on mobile?
I’d love to see the silent majority defend their stance on quality content!
Can someone even show me what your opinion of quality content is because I’m willing to bet it's not the same as mine.
And without links you can’t rank your quality content for a competitive keyword…however with links you can rank crappy content, or even a page without content for a competitive keyword.
So let's debate it…
Quality content is subjective and can only be seen after it's been posted, ranked, viewed and read and the majority of people just scan the content, they don’t even read it.
And content needs to be indexed before it can be ranked and since Google has a Crawl Budget that limits the number of pages Google will crawl in a given amount of time, a Crawl Rate, that limits how often they crawl, a Crawl Depth that limits how deep they will crawl and a Crawl Timeout that will cause Google to abandon the crawl altogether, and all these things are affected by having clean code and having the first content paint in under a second then before we can even get started we have to say page speed and clean code matters most.
Because Google can’t even find your content if they can’t crawl your website.
Other words, you can have the best content in the world but if the search engines can’t find and index it then it doesn’t matter.
And then you have Core Web Vitals!
Google has clearly stated that your site should achieve an LCP under 2.5 seconds to avoid performance issues. If your largest content element takes longer than this to load, it indicates a problem that could negatively impact your SEO rankings.
Optimizing for Core Web Vitals, particularly LCP, is crucial for maintaining and improving search visibility.
And Then You Have User Experience and Engagement!
Google’s own research shows bounce rate increases by the millisecond.
People aren't counting minutes, not even seconds, their counting milliseconds … page speed matters!
You should be trying for .5 milliseconds.
Google lost 20% of their traffic when they went from .3 to .5 load times! Amd consumers are more Demanding than ever before.
1. Uber’s faster than a taxi.
2. You can have the answer to any question in 0.3 seconds because at .5 Google lost 20% of their traffic.
3. Netflix and Spotify deliver content on demand.
4. When you finish Uber you just walk out.
5. You can have a car pick you up in five minutes.
6. A pizza delivered in 20 minutes.
7. And groceries in 60 minutes.
ALL the businesses currently DISRUPTING industries, are ALL REMOVING some kind of FRICTION.
Friction is anything you put between someone and the completion of a task.
It can be anything from...
1.) waiting for a website to load
2.) having to search for a product.
Friction ='s time ='s money.
So you should be in the business of removing friction, which means making things as fast and easy as possible which in turn saves time and money.