User:Prwharris/Google Love

Google Love: (Goo-gle Love) | goo:gul:luv | noun

What your business experiences when you align it with Google’s search model.

The result of Google Love – better Google rankings, better quality score, lower PPC costs, more traffic, longer visit duration, more pages visited, more likely to buy, more likely to return.

correct use: I want to Google Love my website. I want to Google Love my business etc.

Google's goal is simple - to be the best search engine on the planet. It aims to serve its customers by offering choices that are 1) the most relevant and 2) provide the most enjoyable user experience.

Whilst Google's algorithm is a closely guarded secret, the importance of website speed has become increasingly apparent following recent research. Google now state that speed is one of the most important factors in providing web users with the best customer experience and have declared their intention to 'make the web faster'.

Quotes from Google:

‘a speedy site will rank better (this is also true for adverts)’ Source: Google Communications & Public Affairs Dept.

‘making the web faster continues to be our main area of focus’ Source: Darin Fisher-Google Chrome

‘at Google we constantly focus on speed’ Source: Page Speed Team-Google Webmaster Central

Google Love is what you experience when you align your website with Google's model. If you make your website faster, Google rewards you. In today's market creating Google Love can be the difference between amazing business success and obscurity.

How to get Google Love

There are a number of factors that affect page load speed. Addressing all of these will make Google fall in love with your website. However, independent study has shown that ensuring your website is hosted on the fastest servers, on the fastest network, and within the country in which your are doing business is the most effective way to generate an immediate increase in performance.

> Regularly test the page load time of your website

> Ensure that your web hosting provider can deliver pages at at least 500Kb/sec

> Use fewer and faster redirects

> Don’t use interstitial pages

> Compress all images

> Compress the size of your page

Google Research

Google understand that great user experience drives more business. Recent research from Google has uncovered the dramatic effect that page load speed has on user experience and that a direct relationship exists between website speed and business results. As a result Google have declared speed as one of their top priorities.

> 0.5 second delay in page load speed reduced traffic by 20%

> 30% increase in page load speed resulted in a 30% increase in customers

The Google model now rewards fast loading sites with higher rankings, and penalises slow loading sites with poor AdWords quality scores and higher costs.

A speedy website ensures you receive Google Love.

Google speed study

Google Vice President Marissa Mayer (Vice President, Search Products & User Experience) last spoke at the Web 2.0 Conference and offered tidbits on what Google has learned about speed, the user experience, and user satisfaction. Marissa started with a story about a user test they did. They asked a group of Google searchers how many search results they wanted to see. Users asked for more, more than the ten results Google normally shows. More is more, they said.

So, Marissa ran an experiment where Google increased the number of search results to thirty. Traffic and revenue from Google searchers in the experimental group dropped by 20%.

Ouch. Why? Why, when users had asked for this, did they seem to hate it? After investigation Marissa explained that they found an uncontrolled variable. The page with 10 results took .4 seconds to generate. The page with 30 results took .9 seconds.

Half a second delay caused a 20% drop in traffic. Half a second delay killed user satisfaction.

This conclusion may be surprising -- people notice a half second delay? -- but Amazon.com had a similar experience. In A/B tests, they tried delaying the page in increments of 100 milliseconds and found that even very small delays would result in substantial and costly drops in revenue.

Being fast really matters. As Marissa said in her talk, “Users really respond to speed.”

Marissa went on to explain how the same effect was tested and observed on Google Maps. When Google trimmed their page load time down by abot 30 percent, they experienced a 30 percent increase in requests. “It was almost proportional,” said Marissa. “If you make your site faster, you get back that in terms of increased usage almost immediately”.

For Google and any other website, speed means people visiting more pages in the same visit, spending more time overall...and more money.

Google Load Time Advice

1. How does load time affect my landing page quality? You are able to see a grade for your landing page’s load time in your AdWords account. ‘Load time’ refers to the amount of time it takes for a user to view your landing page after clicking your ad. Several weeks after your load time grade becomes visible, it will begin to impact your landing page quality and, therefore, your Quality Score. We recommend working to improve your load time during this interim if it’s received a low score.

2. Why is load time a factor? Users value ads that bring them to the information they want as efficiently as possible. A high-quality landing page should have a fast load time as well as feature unique, relevant content. Fast load times benefit advertisers as well, since users are less likely to abandon a site that loads quickly.

3. How is my load time graded? Each of your keywords will receive a load time grade based on the average load time of the landing pages in the ad group and of any landing pages in the rest of the account with the same domain. If multiple ad groups have landing pages with the same domain, therefore, the keywords in all these ad groups will have identical load time grades.

Two things to note: When determining load time grade, the AdWords system follows destination URLs at both the ad and keyword level and evaluates the final landing page.

If your ad group contains landing pages with different domains, the keywords’ load time grades will be based on the domain with the slowest load time. All the keywords in an ad group will always have the same load time grade.

Google evaluate your load time relative to the average in your server’s geographic region. If your website is hosted on a server in India, for example, your landing page load time will be compared to the average load time in that region of India. This is true even if your website is intended for an audience in the United States.

4. How can I see if my load time is good or not? You can see a keyword’s load time grade on the Keyword Analysis page: if your keyword is graded This page loads slowly, your landing page quality and Quality Score will be negatively affected.

If your keyword is graded No problems found, your landing page quality and Quality Score will not be affected. The one exception is if your keyword is graded No problems found and marked Load time is faster than the average in your server’s geographic region. In this case, your landing page quality and Quality Score may be positively affected.

5. How can I improve my load time? The AdWords system re-evaluates landing pages on a regular basis. If you make significant improvements to your landing page’s load time, you should see improved Quality Scores. Note that your Quality Score may update incrementally over a number of weeks after you improve your load time.

To improve your load time:

> Regularly test the page load time of your website

> Ensure that your web hosting provider can deliver pages at at least 500Kb/sec

> Use fewer and faster redirects

> Don’t use interstitial pages

> Compress all images

> Compress the size of your page

'''Speed matters. People do not like to wait. Do not make them.'''