Website performance and SEO are closely intertwined, with faster loading times leading to better user engagement and higher search engine rankings. As a critical aspect of digital strategy, understanding how optimization tools impact these areas is essential for any business looking to maximize online visibility.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of optimizing your website to increase its visibility in search engine results. The goal of SEO is to attract more organic traffic by ensuring that your content ranks higher for relevant searches. Key factors that influence SEO include time on page, bounce rate, and page load speed, among others.
Page performance refers to how quickly and efficiently a web page loads and responds to user interactions. It directly impacts user experience and SEO rankings, as faster pages tend to retain visitors and rank higher in search engine results.
As a website experience optimization platform, we are frequently asked if and how our experience optimization affects page performance and SEO. The Impact varies depending on the specific metric in question:
Time on Page
- What It Means: Time on page measures the duration a visitor spends on a particular webpage. Longer time on page suggests that the content is engaging and relevant, which is a positive signal to search engines like Google.
- Trendemon’s Role: Trendemon’s autonomous orchestrations and content recommendations automatically guide visitors to top-performing pages—those with higher read rates and lower bounce rates. Trendemon’s page-level optimization displays personalized page elements and/or diverts traffic to top-performing page variations. Personalized content is more engaging, therefore visitors are likely to spend more time on the page, which can enhance the page’s SEO performance by indicating to search engines that visitors find the content valuable. Therefore the impact on this metric is positive.
Bounce Rate
- What It Means: Bounce rate refers to the percentage of visitors who leave the website after viewing only one page. A high bounce rate can indicate that the content was not relevant or compelling enough to keep the visitor’s attention.
- Trendemon’s Role: By providing personalized content recommendations and offers tailored to the visitor’s interests, Trendemon increases the likelihood that visitors will engage with more content on the website rather than leaving after just one page. A lower bounce rate is another positive indicator for SEO, showing that your site offers valuable content that keeps visitors on your site longer. Therefore the impact on this metric is positive.
Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) and Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)
- What They Mean:
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- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): This metric measures the visual stability of a webpage. It quantifies how much of the page's content shifts as it loads. A lower CLS score indicates a more stable page, which is better for user experience, page performance and SEO.
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): This metric measures loading performance, specifically how long it takes for the largest visible content element (like an image or text block) to load. A faster LCP contributes to a better user experience and, by extension, better page performance and better SEO.
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- Trendemon’s Role: Most issues with CLS and LCP typically exist before implementing Trendemon’s script. Since Trendemon’s personalization tools do not significantly alter the loading process or visual stability of a webpage, the impact on these metrics is minor, if any.
Page Load Speed
- What It Means: Page load speed is the time it takes for a webpage to fully load. Faster load times improve user experience and are a ranking factor for page performance and SEO. Slow load times can negatively affect SEO as they might lead to higher bounce rates and lower visitor engagement.
- Trendemon’s Role: By default, customers typically use the asynchronous version of our code, and install it on their website. This code is designed to be the last to load on the page, minimizing any impact on page performance. However, in certain scenarios where faster loading of Trendemon’s personalization features is crucial—such as with ACE and Race page-level optimization—customers can opt to use our synchronous code on those specific pages which are loaded amongst the first scripts on the page.
We performed a comparative analysis using Google Pagespeed to measure the page load time with and without Trendemon’s code. On average, Trendemon’s script adds 140 milliseconds to the speed index metric. Additional time can potentially be added to load personalized elements on the page, depending on their size. For comparison, other personalization vendors' scripts (for example - Optimizely) can take an average of 745 milliseconds to execute and load on the page.
Therefore the impact of page load speed is additional 140 milliseconds plus an incremental time to load personalization units, depending on their size.
If you have any questions, SEO related or other, please feel free to reach out to us. You can book a demo here or write to our support team at support@trendemon.com.