← Voices of Search // A Search Engine Optimization (SEO) & Content Marketing Podcast
Voices of Search // A Search Engine Optimization (SEO) & Content Marketing Podcast
Measuring How Speed Impacts SEO & UX
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- [00:00]
Podcast Announcer
The Voices of Search Podcast is a proud member of the I Hear Everything Podcast Network. Looking to launch or scale your podcast, I Hear Everything delivers podcast production, growth and monetization solutions that transform your words into profit. Ready to give your brand a voice then visit iheareverything.com welcome to the Voices of Search Podcast. A member of the I Hear Everything Podcast network, ready to expedite your company's organic growth efforts. Sit back, relax, and get ready for your daily dose of search engine optimization wisdom. Here's today's host of the Voices of Search podcast, Jordan Cooney.
- [00:43]
Jordan Cooney
Hello marketers and SEOs. My name is Jordan Cooney from Pre Visible. Joining me today is Matthew Edgar who is the partner and technical SEO consultant at Elementive. Elementive is a data driven digital marketing agency that helps build businesses, optimize their online presence and drive measurable results. Yesterday, Matthew and I talked about how core Web vitals affects SEO. And today we're going to continue our conversation discussing measuring how speed impacts SEO and ux. Okay, here's my conversation with Matthew Edgar, the technical SEO consultant and partner at Elementive. Matthew, welcome back to the show.
- [01:23]
Matthew Edgar
Hello. Thanks for having me on.
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Jordan Cooney
Absolutely. So yesterday we covered Core Web Vitals and how it connects to SEO. It was really one of our best episodes on Core Web Vitals because we covered everything from what it truly means and how it should be viewed in terms of its impact in SEO, but more importantly, the core purpose of it, no pun intended there, of how it really impacts user experience and it's truly intended to help you connect with your customers, users, community, and that's the true purpose of it. Today we're going down the measurement of speed and how that connects to SEO and ux. And I know that you wrote a book on speed metrics, so tell us a little bit about the book before we go into this whole conversation around metrics.
- [02:14]
Matthew Edgar
Absolutely. So I have a new book that just came out earlier this year called Speed Metrics Guide and the book goes through and looks at the main metrics that that you need to use to measure your website's speed and it looks at core vitals, but it also looks at other metrics that you can use to measure your website speed. And the way the book is structured is each chapter focuses on an individual metric and the book follows the process of how a website is loading from the initial connection to the website all the way through to the end of the website when people are interacting with the website and the website is fully loaded at that point. So each chapter goes through and looks at a specific metric, talking about what that metric is, what that metric measures, and then also talks about ways you can measure that metric, different tools that you can use, including lots of free tools that you can use to measure all these metrics.
- [03:02]
Jordan Cooney
Awesome. Love it. Ultimately, this book isn't just about SEO, it's beyond that. Right. It's looking at the connection of why these metrics matter and what it ultimately does for your website.
- [03:17]
Matthew Edgar
Correct. It certainly touches on SEO and that's a part of it, certainly, as we get into thinking about like core vitals metrics. But it's all aspects of user experience and it's how it affects the users who are loading the website, how people are interacting with the website throughout the entire process, Whether they come to your website through organic search or some other method, you want to make sure your website loads as fast as possible. So this is really a step back to look at each of these individual metrics that you can use to understand all aspects of that.
- [03:49]
Jordan Cooney
That's right. And I hope for our listeners, if you want to grab the book, you can find it on Amazon again, it's called Speed Metrics Guide, written by Matthew Edgar. And it's great because, you know, this is a book that's not just for the technical engineering folks, but it's for the non technical audiences. And it allows you as an SEO to connect with marketers, designers, UX professionals, and ultimately drive forward the speed metrics that are going to help you connect with your users and customers.
- [04:18]
Matthew Edgar
And I would just underscore, it really is written for everybody involved in a website. I mean, developers will definitely benefit from it, but so will marketers, so will people who are not developers, who are not very technically inclined. And that's really important to me because I think that so many people have a role to play in improving website speed. It's not just for developers. Developers need to be involved in that, certainly. But a lot of things about speed end up being big business decisions of what do we actually want on the website or not. There's only so much a developer can do if you've decided from a business that we want these 15 tracking scripts on our site or we want these huge features or stuff. But it's hard to understand what the implications of those business decisions are if you don't have some kind of understanding of how speed works or what those implications might be from those decisions.
- [05:10]
Jordan Cooney
Absolutely. And going into our topic for today, right, like I think this is a great segue measuring how speed impacts SEO and ux. The one Thing that really comes to mind is that so much focus is just given to one metric, which is how fast is your website? Right. And so let's start there. Like, is that the holy grail? Is that the only metric that matters or should we be exploring beyond that?
- [05:37]
Matthew Edgar
So that's a tough question to answer, right? How fast is website? Well, what do you mean by that? Because there's lots of different aspects to how a website loads. And how I like to talk about it is that a website is really just a process, right? And there's lots of different things that have to happen during that process. The process starts with somebody types the website address into their browser or clicks on a link on a Google search result or somewhere else to request the page. The browser starts doing work, right? Then. So you can ask, well, how fast does that process happen? How fast is the browser able to connect to the website? That's an aspect of how fast the website loads. But then once that connection happens, then you go to the next part. The browser has to receive stuff from the server and has to start painting that to the page. That's an aspect of how fast the website loads. And then things are painting to the page. But now people want to start interacting with the page. Well, how long does it take to get from when painting starts, when interacting starts, that's an aspect of how the website loads. And on and on and on. You can go through each of the individual stages. So what I encourage people to do is don't ask a question of how fast is my website? Or how fast does my website load? That's way too broad a question. You need to bring that down to more specific levels and say, okay, let's look at each stage. So how fast is that initial connection to my website? How fast is the painting process? How fast do I get to a point where people can interact? How fast can people interact once we get to the point that they can interact? And by narrowing it down by asking more specific questions, you can actually get somewhere more meaningful with understanding website speed. If you're asking a super broad question of, well, how fast is my website? You're going to just end up spinning around in circles because you won't know what metric to look at. You won't know what to pay attention to. You won't know where to really begin if you ask a question that broad.
- [07:16]
Jordan Cooney
I love that. And it's exactly why this conversation is so insightful, is that it isn't just a single isolated question. This is actually not even an analogy. This is the entire Track and field event. This isn't just the 40 meter dash, right?
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Matthew Edgar
Exactly.
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Jordan Cooney
So you gotta take all those different types of skill sets and body types and capabilities to have a whole track meet, Right. You gotta have the shop putter and you gotta have the sprinter, you gotta have the distance runner. And all of those components are what you just described as to how you can measure what speed really is on a website. And each of them have some material impact on the ultimate experience that a user has. And so let's go there in terms of the next question, which is, what are we actually trying to measure for here? And what's the ultimate goal, not just for SEOs, but for everyone that's involved in the development and the creation of a website?
- [08:14]
Matthew Edgar
Yeah, I think as you think about it from a user experience standpoint, you want to think about, well, what metrics affect the user the most? And those are going to be things that are in the later stage of the website loading process. Once the visitor actually has something to look at, once they actually have a page in front of them, they're going to want to start doing stuff on that page. So you want to start looking at interaction times. There's different metrics you can use for that. So that's a place to begin is you can start looking at that. And that's a more specific question you can ask of how quickly can people interact with my site? So one way you can answer that is with the newest core vitals metric that just came out, Interactions. Next paint. That tells you how quickly people can actually interact, how quickly the website will respond when somebody tries to click on a button or tap on a link or something like that. But there's other metrics that you can use to answer that interaction question. You can look at timed interactive, you can look at total blocking time, time to interactive, just gives you an idea of when the website would be available for somebody to start interacting. And if you start to see that those metrics are high, those metrics are a little bit slower than they should be, then you know, okay, people can't interact very quickly on my site. And then you can start moving backwards from there in the website loading process to ask, why? Why can't people interact very quickly? And then you start looking at other metrics that do describe the user experience with painting or with how quickly the website is able to be presented to the visitor. That's another way of understanding the user experience of how quickly can people see the page on here. So those are, I think, probably the two biggest ways that really affect the user experience very directly. And some of the more specific questions to potentially ask to understand what kind of experience do people have on this site.
- [09:56]
Jordan Cooney
And you know, the crazy thing is that as we dissect and get further into these KPIs, right? Like let's take the newest metric, right? And let's discuss Interaction and Next Paint, right? Because Interaction and Next Paint, in its essence is a metric that helps us better understand the user experience from a given response, right? You're doing an action and is that action fully complete and can I experience that full action? Right. I think, I think Google gives the example of you try to add a cart or you try to like open or expand and how long does it really take for that full event to take place? That the item I added to my cart is now in the cart or the expandable gives me all of the content and images that are in it, right? And so this is really unique because these metrics are layered into one another, right? There are other events that are happening, right? And they're an evolution to how we both measure, but also inform our teams and our partners about what's happening on our website. And so, Matthew, I want to understand how do we interpret the individual metrics that Google's giving us insight into, like inp and then how do we use that to evolve SEO and ux? I know that's a meaty question, but bear with me. Let's break it down for our listeners.
- [11:12]
Matthew Edgar
Yeah, so I'll go through each of those parts. So I think the first part, you know, how do we communicate and talk about these metrics and share that? What I always recommend is don't ever just share one metric. Make sure that you share context and have that entire story presented in the metrics you share. So sure, share imp specifically and say, okay, our imp is 300 milliseconds or whatever it is, but then also share other things as well. So I was talking earlier about how there's different stages of the website loading process. You should have a metric or two from each of those stages. So the initial stage, time to first byte, is a great way to measure that. The middle stages of painting the page first, Contentful paint is a great way to show that. The later stages, there's really good metrics to show that with time to interactive speed index and so on. Largest Contentful pain even can be helpful there. By showing all those metrics, you can get more context behind what's actually the problem on here. So that way you're not just looking at it in Isolation saying, oh, our INP is 300 milliseconds, but you can also understand, well, yeah, but our time to first byte is also two seconds, so maybe that's our bigger problem. And, and that time to first byte being so high would actually explain some of our other problems so that you can understand the full picture behind this instead of just looking at one metric in isolation. I think that's one of the biggest mistakes that I see people make on here in terms of what actions to then take from it and how do you interpret that and understand what to do. I think it helps there too, because then you know where you need to focus. If you look at a whole spectrum of metrics and you say, okay, I know that I have all these other metrics and I know my IMP is high, but I also know time to first buy is high, well, then, you know, you actually need to focus there and you need to drill in on that and you need to figure out how do you fix that. Not actually try and fix IMP directly, but if you look at your other metrics and say, well, no, they're actually all good, but imp is high, then you know there's something specifically wrong with that. And then you can start exploring that to see what you need to do. So it helps you narrow down where you need to to actually focus which metric you actually need to improve. Too often I see people, they only look at the one metric, they only look at something in isolation, and they end up fixing that one thing, but ignoring some of the bigger problems that end up existing elsewhere.
- [13:29]
Jordan Cooney
Absolutely. And the beauty of all of this is that just a few years ago, we didn't have a world where we could have constructive conversation around experience. Experience was largely a debated conversation in most, you know, offices. And this is pre Covid in work settings. And so where we're at today is an evolution of not only where Google is introducing new metrics, right, like the most recent introduction of Interaction to Next Paint, but they're explaining them in a way that helps us now have conversation and collectively look at the whole experience. Because to your point, it's not about just one metric. It's about looking at all the metrics and looking at the whole experience. And are we giving the user what they need and expect, and can we improve it in any way? The metrics just allow us to create a baseline to understand that place to go and improve.
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Matthew Edgar
Exactly.
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Jordan Cooney
So let's talk about that from an SEO and UX perspective. What are these baselines? How do we collect that information? How do we Inform ourselves. If we're looking at all these metrics, how do we get to a place where we really know what to focus on, what the next step might be?
- [14:38]
Matthew Edgar
Yeah. So as you look at all the metrics that you have, as you go through, you want to think about each metric and what the potential impact of that is on the user experience. Like you said, we're actually at a point where we can quantify some of those impacts on the user experience. And you can put that to the test. You can look at your analytics tools and say, okay, here's these 10 pages that I know are really slow on my website. Are engagement times worse? Here's these pages that are on my website that are faster. Are engagement times better? You can actually quantify this and you can actually look at this in comparison so you understand if there's really a problem behind that or not. And then with understanding all those metrics and understanding the potential impact of that, then you can start to understand how much you need to pay attention to speed versus some other aspect of user experience on your website. And in the case of speed, if that is the thing that you say we need to focus on that, that is impairing our user experience in some kind of meaningful way, then you can actually start peeling back the layers of each of these core vitals metrics to understand it, because they're all very deep metrics. Once you start digging into it. Picking on interaction. Next Paint, it's actually a roll up of three different metrics that go into that interaction. It's input delay, its processing time, it's presentation delay, that all feed into that largest. Contentful Paint has all of its little sub components as well. So does cumulative layout shift with how it's coming in. So you can start digging into each of those a little bit more to understand. Okay, where specifically is the problem? How is this specifically hurting the people who are on our site?
- [16:10]
Jordan Cooney
And when we're in a place where SEO is struggling, or let's say we're in the midst of a major site migration or redesign, how should we think about the use of these KPIs and the measurement of these KPIs?
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Matthew Edgar
The goal should always be, obviously you want to make them as fast as possible, but you want to make them only as fast as you need to. How I talk about it is it's you want to get to a good enough point on each of these metrics. That doesn't necessarily mean you need to hit Google's ideal threshold. You just need to make it good enough where it's not making it hard for Google to crawl the site, not making it hard for people to use the site. So if you are in the middle of a site migration, that's a great opportunity to try and improve some of these metrics. But you don't want to obsess so much on improving the metrics at the expense of other things that are important within that site migration as well. That's where I do use the phrase good enough really intentionally here. You want to get the metrics good enough and then stop and just say, okay, we've gotten this as fast as we need to. We're going to move on. We're going to focus on something else that might be focusing on other speed metrics that you can work on and improve that you need to just tweak a little bit more. Could be moving on to improving other technical SEO issues or other problems within.
- [17:29]
Jordan Cooney
The ux Matthew that's an excellent summary and a really phenomenal endpoint for our episode because it goes to show that this is a constant evolution. It's not just a single effort to reach an ending, but it's a process of continuing to improve and execute on just not only your performance and speed, but the whole experience that you provide your users, customers and community. That wraps up this episode of the Voice of the Search Podcast. Thank you to Matthew Edgar, partner and technical SEO Consultant at Elementive, for joining us. If you'd like to get in touch with Matthew, you can find a link to his LinkedIn profile in our show notes or visit his company website, Matthew Edgar, you can also find a link to his book Speed Metric Guide in our Show Notes.
- [18:15]
Podcast Announcer
Okay, thanks to Jordan Cooney, the founder of Pre Visible. If you'd like to get in touch with Jordan, you can find a link to his LinkedIn profile in our show notes. You can contact him on Twitter. His handle is J.T. cooney. That's J T K O E N E. Or you can visit his company's website, which is Previsible IO that's P R E V I S I B L E I O Just one more link in our Show Notes I'd like to tell you about. If you didn't have a chance to take notes while you were listening to this podcast, head over to voicesofsearch.com, where we have summaries of all of our episodes and contact information for our guests. You can also subscribe to our weekly newsletter and you can even send us your topic suggestions or your marketing questions, which we'll answer live on our show. Of course, you can always reach out on social media. Our handle is voicesofsearch on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, or you can contact me directly. My hands handle is benjschab. B E N J S H A B and if you haven't subscribed yet and you want a daily stream of SEO and content marketing insights in your podcast feed, we're going to publish an episode every day during the work week. So hit that subscribe button in your podcast app and we'll be back in your feed tomorrow morning. All right, that's it for today. But until next time, remember, the answers are always in the data.