The marketing stack dictates infrastructure before content
Success in an earned media channel like organic search hinges on content. Specifically, on producing helpful content that has the ability to rank. Google has focused its recent algorithmic updates largely on promoting great content and natural links, and penalizing weak content with unscrupulous links (see also: Medic, BERT, and its legacy predecessors like Panda, Penguin, and Hummingbird).
But as SEO professionals prioritize content recommendations, keyword research, and link acquisition strategies (the more immediate factors in obtaining rankings), they risk devaluing technical changes — including site speed — that absolutely make clients more money on their existing organic audiences.
No content or channel initiative works without infrastructure (i.e. fast websites) and analytics. They are foundational to digital marketing success.
Content marketing is undeniably effective at getting sites to rank in search engines, which might satiate a client’s curiosity about what SEO can do for their visibility. And you might even be able to get slow sites to rank consistently, but the lack of attention to infrastructure will eventually come back to haunt you in conversion rates.
Site speed study
Sending prospective customers generated by good content to websites with slow experiences erodes trust literally by the second.
Our latest site speed study[1] refresh looked at 10 websites spanning a number of industries and 26,000 different landing pages, ranging in performance from extremely slow pages (upwards of 9 seconds) to extremely fast (under one second).
The results showed that every second you can shave off your page load speed has intense conversion rate benefits that defy differences in verticals or selling approaches.
Pages that loaded in under one second converted at a rate around 2.5 times higher than pages that loaded slower than five seconds or more.
But the