Are you familiar with the saying, “Every little helps”?
Sometimes in the quest for big things, we tend to miss out on the small things that can have a significant impact.
In SEO, it's true.
There are a few ‘little' important things that most of the SEOs I know either forget or ignore. And, these are so simple you'll kick yourself for it because they are decisive ranking factors that can give you the edge over your competition. These are:
- Page Speed
- Security
As security and speed analysis are gaining more and more importance, it is crucial for SEOs to take them a bit more seriously while auditing the sites to find improvement opportunities.
But, they shouldn’t consider it as an additional task. So, to make it easy for them, we added two new sections – Security Analysis and Speed Analysis – to SERPed’s site auditor tool – Site Auditor Pro.
If you are a SERPed user, the next time you log into your SERPed account, you will see two new sections in the SEO Review report under Site Manager. These are:
- Security Analysis
- Speed Analysis
Further, in this post, we’ll dive into the data these two sections show and how you can use them to gain more insights.
Let’s get started!
Security Analysis
Ever since Google announced that it would consider HTTPs as a ranking signal, many websites installed SSL certificates. But, there were still a few who didn’t care much about it.
To ensure that consumer’s privacy is protected, from October 2017, the search engine giant started showing ‘Not Secure’ text in its Chrome browser on the pages with text input fields not having the SSL properly implemented.
One of the benefits of securing all URLs is – If a site has all URLs secured, it gets the green “Secure” message in the browser which builds trust and increases conversion.
Another benefit of switching to HTTPS is that your referrer data remains intact.
When you have unsecured HTTP, you don’t get insights on referral data as most of it is lost and appears as ‘Direct’ in your analytics reporting contributing to what is referred as ‘dark traffic.’
The ‘Security Analysis’ section gives you insight about:
- Whether a site has an SSL certificate implemented or not
- Even if a site has SSL certificate, is every URL on the site secured?
Going a step further; it also shows you all the unsecured URLs, so you know what all URLs you need to work on.
Speed Analysis
With Google’s introduction of a mobile-first index in 2017, Page Speed has now become more critical than ever.
If you are still not convinced (which I believe is not the case), and by any chance have in mind – how and why does Page Speed matter?
Then, check this… how Page Speed can impact your revenue.
Australian retailer Booktopia in one of their presentations in 2017 shared that speeding up their page load times by 1 second resulted in an extra $600,000 on the bottom line.
Yes, $600,000 extra in profit just from improving the Page Speed by 1 sec.
Now that you know how Page Speed can impact your ranking and revenue, let’s have a quick look at data and optimization insights you get under ‘Speed Analysis’ section:
We believe these new additions will further empower you to take your SEO to the next step and serve your clients (if you do client SEO) better.
Here’s a short video to brief you about how these two advancements can help you be better at Site Audit.
Let me know your thoughts regarding these enhancements and feel free to reach out to us about anything related to SERPed.