Site speed is the number one improvement you can make. Why? Well, first, Google loves fast sites and has told us that they use it as a ranking factor (ie extremely important for organic ranking). So if you want to improve your organic rankings, it is imperative to speed your site up. But how fast should it be? I like to say, at least faster than your competitors! So if you do some competitive research and see that your competitors generally have load times faster than yours, then you better start working to get a faster load time. This can be some easy, “low hanging fruit” to improve your rankings. As for an official ruling, you can follow Google’s advice and work to keep your LCP (Largest Contentful Paint) to under 2.5 seconds to get an “A” score.

Besides Google, and perhaps even more important than Google, are your site visitors. Due to multi-screening and the digital age in general, attention spans have been decreasing at an ever alarming rate. And with some reports showing the average attention span is now less than a goldfish at 8.25 seconds, you definitely do not want half that time or all of it spent on your site loading.

So what can you do to improve your site load time? I start by using two tools: GTMetrix (make sure to sign up for an account and set the test server in a location that your audience is in, ie their Texas server for users in the US) and Google PageSpeed Insights. Both of these tools will provide specific things you can work on to improve your scores. Next, list out the items by number that you plan to “fix”. Perform one fix at a time and make a note of the date and the scores before and after. I highly recommend to only make one optimization at a time until you see consistent scores.

I also recommend using a CDN (Content Delivery Network) like Cloudflare to assist with your site load. Once you implement Cloudflare, there are settings that will be automatically applied which you can then adjust based on your needs.

Continuing with the importance of Google and user theme brings us to your page titles. When I say page title, I am referring to your page “meta data” title, which is the text that shows in Google as the first line of a search result and in the tab of your browser.

Here is an example of Amazon’s search listing, with their page title being the larger, blue text:

And this is how their page title shows in a browser tab (text in the top left of this screenshot):

Notice how they keep the page title focused on their “why”.

Every page of your site should have an optimized page title, and you would be surprised how many businesses neglect this important optimization.

How do you best optimize your page title? First, it should be optimized for your target keyword for that page so Google knows what the page is about. Second, it should then be optimized for your users so they know what the page is about, where it lives on your site, and some additional information such as a call to action, selling point, or general branding. A structure that I like to use is as follows:

“Keyword” | “Page Location” | “Brand Name”

So an example could be:

Blue Cars for Sale | Blue Car Listing | CarsOnlineNow.Com

There are many optimizations that can be done and continue to be done for your paid campaigns on Google Ads, Microsoft Ads, and so on. However, odds are that you are running a paid ads campaign to sell something or drive leads. So, assuming your conversion tracking is set up and attributing properly, then focusing on conversions through your bid strategy is a quick optimization you can make to improve performance almost immediately.

But how can you do this? First, let’s focus on just Google Ads. When you log in to Google Ads, within your campaign settings you can find the bid strategy. In there, you have the option to change your bid strategy to be focused on conversions. I highly recommend a CPA or ROAS target rather than driving as many conversions as possible, because most likely ROI is important to you. Now, I do not recommend just switching your campaign over, especially if it is a vitally important campaign. Instead, set up an experiment to split test against your current campaign. This will allow you to allocate a portion of the budget to the experiment without interrupting your current campaign. In addition, you can optimize the experiment campaign until you have steady performance that exceeds your current campaign, which at that point you can convert the experiment to a new campaign/pause the current campaign (what I recommend) or apply the settings to the current campaign.

For more information about conversion based bid strategies, how to implement them, and tons of more useful information, check out Google’s specific help section here: https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/7381968?hl=en