What if you could make your site show up higher on search engine pages without doing any on-site or off-site SEO? How much more money would you make if your site could go from being the #6 site to the #2 site on Google? What if you could increase your click-to-conversion rate without changing any of your site’s content?
I work for a site acceleration solution called MaxCDN that does just that. MaxCDN is a site acceleration service, which means that it remotely stores your website on a fast server with a supercharged Internet connection.
How does site acceleration make me show up higher on Google?
When most online marketers think about how to make their site show up higher on Google, they think about one thing: SEO. Search engine optimization. Get posts on blogs and use backlinks to bump up your site on search results. An SEO campaign needs to be employed with any site acceleration program, but using SEO alone to bump your site up on Google can cause a few problems:
Blacklisting
Google’s official policy is to not display sites whose owners have purchased inbound links on search engine results. A poorly executed link buying campaign can backfire by forcing Google to delist your site from its search results. This is very common for companies who hire outsourced SEO companies in India since the link builders there mostly trade links with other link builders, while American-based SEO companies get posts up on legitimate blogs.
Failure to maximize value from SEO campaign
Despite the risk of being blacklisted, you still will not show up on search engines unless you either get backlinks to your site on your own (in-house SEO) or get somebody else to do it. However, these links will be less effective with a slow loading site because Google favors websites that have fast load times. As a result, even a whitehat SEO campaign run by a good third-party company will not be as effective if your webpage is not loading as fast as it possibly can.
How does site acceleration increase my conversion rate?
Most potential leads are lost in the first eight seconds after they have clicked on your site, so imagine that a highly targeted lead clicks on an AdSense ad. The ad directs them to a webpage and the page takes six seconds to load the text. The lead’s already frustrated since they’re used to pages loading quickly. It takes a few more seconds to load the images. Now the video starts to load and the browser crashes since it can’t figure out how to render such a slowly loading video. That lead will never come back to your site because it loaded too slowly. You’ve noticed that you have an ultra-low conversion rate, so to increase your conversion rate you decide to try out a site acceleration service so that that does not happen again.
Increased conversion rate
Two weeks later, the same lead gripes to his friend about how your site crashed his browser and wouldn’t load. His friend decides to see what the lead’s steaming about, so the friend goes to your site and it loads almost instantly. The friend is also a highly targeted potential lead so she signs up for your service. She gets her friend, the original lead, to come back and sign up.
The end result is that by simply hosting your site remotely on a fast server (which also remotely hosts your videos on a separate server so that they do not slow down load time), you’ve increased the conversion rate in the most critical point in the sales funnel after the initial click. On top of that, you’ve gained more traffic since your site shows up higher on Google. Your site is making more money because you chose a good site acceleration service like MaxCDN.
This is a guest post by David Henzel, the Vice President of Marketing at NetDNA.
