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SMX East 2016: Satisfying The Need For Speed

Columnist Eric Enge recaps a session at SMX East on the impact of page speed on SEO, presented by former Google Search Quality team member Fili Wiese.

Eric Enge on November 2, 2016 at 1:00 pm

At the recent SMX East conference in New York, I sat in on a session presented by Fili Wiese, titled, “The Need for Speed.” Wiese is a former member of Google’s search quality team who also worked as a clickspam engineer.

In this session, he presented a lot of great technical data, as well as information on ways to improve site performance.

One of the articles Wiese referenced was “Page Load Times vs. Conversion Rates,” and the data contained in that article is truly compelling:

If that isn’t motivation enough, Google has said that they plan to make page speed a direct ranking factor on mobile devices. You may ask how big a factor it might become, but I do think that speed matters a lot to mobile users, so there is reason to believe that this is a ranking factor that will have some weight to it.

Bigger than content quality and links? Don’t be silly. But still, it’s a signal that could have some impact.

The great majority of sites have many potential opportunities to dramatically speed things up.

[To learn more about how to speed up your website, read the full article on Search Engine Land.]

Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Marketing Land. Staff authors are listed here.

About The Author

Eric Enge

Eric Enge is General Manager of Perficient Digital, a full-service, award-winning digital agency. Previously Eric was the founder and CEO of Stone Temple, also an award-winning digital marketing agency, which was acquired by Perficient in July 2018. He is the lead co-author of The Art of SEO, a 900+ page book that’s known in the industry as “the bible of SEO.” In 2016, Enge was awarded Search Engine Land’s Landy Award for Search Marketer of the Year, and US Search Awards Search Personality of the Year. He is a prolific writer, researcher, teacher and a sought-after keynote speaker and panelist at major industry conferences.