Are you winning the race? Or, and I hate to ask this, have you maybe not realized that you’re in a race yet? Because you are and it is extremely important for you to get your jogging shoes on and get into this race, because Google’s going to leave you behind if you don’t.

The race I’m talking about is how fast your website is loading.

A lot of companies are working on making their websites load faster and faster. Walmart realized that the faster their pages load, the more conversions they get and the more sales that they get, it’s that important.

Your website should be loading completely from start to finish in under two seconds. That’s a great website, that’s compared to a four second car right there. Your website needs to load fast. And in order to for it to load faster, there are certain things that you need to do.

For instance, does the front page of your website have a nice big image on it? A lot of websites do these days, but that big image may take a long time to load. And you might be thinking, “well, I want the image to look really good.”

But is it more important for that image to look good than it is for you to get more customers?

Think of that: You may have a video on your web page that you’ve uploaded to your website, rather than uploading to YouTube and embedding on your website You know that when you embed that YouTube video on your website, you get their ads, it shows that it’s on YouTube, it doesn’t look quite as professional as uploading it directly to your website, does it?

But again, the question is, do you want that video to look like it’s coming straight from you without the YouTube ads? Or do you want your website to load faster so you can get more customers?

Google ranks the load rate of websites so important that if you and a competitor have the same kind of website, but the competitor’s site loads faster, that competitor is going to get higher in the search engine, especially for mobile searches.

And mobile searches are taking up a higher percentage on almost a daily basis right now. Think about it, do you use your phone to do searches? This is a tough one for me, I don’t use my mobile phone to do searches very often. However, my wife doesn’t even open up her computer except for maybe once or twice a week now.

I’m on the computer all the time, because it’s my job, so I’m not using my phone.

Most people. . . I won’t say most. . . Here’s an example: You all know that I run an SEO company, And SEO is not something where people are driving down the road and thinking “oh, I need to get SEO.”

They may be looking for a chiropractor near them or something like that, but they don’t generally look for SEO on a phone. And yet 35% of the people that went to my website in the past 90 days were from a mobile phone.

That was 17% a year ago. That’s how much it jumped in one year. And this is the kind of thing that I would think people generally wouldn’t be looking for on their mobile phones, but they are.

People are on their mobile phones looking for everything. Now, if you think you’re not the kind of company that they’d be looking for in their phone, I’m willing to bet that that’s going to be changing very quickly (if it hasn’t already). You need to be jumping on this.

And Google mobile searches, number one, care about how fast a page loads. But this is not just for the search engines.

If a person comes to your website on a mobile phone, and it takes 10 seconds for that website to load, they’re not going to wait. They will go somewhere else

People are even more impatient on their phones than they are their computers, aren’t they? I am. So, I bet you are too. And that means your customers are as well. We need to have these front pages especially load very fast. Like I said, under two seconds is like having a four-second race car.

Over two seconds isn’t terrible, but over three seconds is and that’s the difference one second can make. You need to have your website load fast. Get in this race and get in it now. If you need help, click here to contact us.

Or, you can download our workbook, “Is Your Web Site SEO Friendly?”  Learn for yourself how fast your website loads. There’s other stuff in there that you can do or not do if you want to. But that’s the big one. Find out how fast your website is loading right now. If it’s more than three seconds, you want to change that. If it’s between two and three, you still might think about what kind of tweaks you can do to make sure that you’re loading just a little bit faster.

-Dr. Ty Belknap, CEO, Port Bell SEO