In the fourth and final part of our ‘What Is SEO Optimisation?’ series of articles, we start off by looking at another factor Google considers: usability of webpages.
Google wants to show results that keep their searchers happy. And this goes beyond providing the “right” content for the query.
There are a couple of confirmed ranking factors that relate to usability.
The first is page speed. Google found that as page load time increases, the chance of someone leaving your website without visiting another page, goes up dramatically.
And it makes sense. If Google were to show slow-loading pages that result in bounces, then that dissatisfaction would increase amongst their users.
As a result, Google announced that page speed has become a part of their mobile search ranking algorithm.
The second usability factor is “mobile friendliness.” Today, websites should appear correctly no matter what device you’re on and no matter what browser you’re using.
This is often referred to as “responsive design.” Google has shifted to “mobile first indexing.” This means that they’ll mainly use the mobile version of the content for indexing and ranking. So all new websites will be “mobile first” by default.