How Can CDN Improve Your Google Ranking?
CDN – Content Delivery Network – is one of the latest SEO buzzwords – but how does it help your Google ranking? CDN integration serves a cached copy of your site from a location closer to the visitor, which drastically reduces average page load times.
So, how does this help?
Page Load Speed
These days, your customers are waiting for the site to load instantly because of their fast website liking. How does the CDN (content distribution network) provide this expectation? In fact, everything is very simple. Google now takes speed into account.Goggle argues that If all else is equal, pages that load faster will rank higher. The reason is that Google did a study that proves that as little as an extra half second in load time reduces the chance that people will stay on the site. CDN is thus particularly valuable for sites with a non-local or even global audience – it allows customers in Europe to load “local” copies of a site in the US. This is particularly important if you have complex sites and/or a lot of video content. The other way to speed up your site is to reduce the use of javascript and such, but if your site has interactive elements such as live chat, this may not be feasible or may negatively effect other things you are trying to do.
Bounce Rate
As mentioned – the faster your site, the more likely people are to stay around. This reduces a key element of page rank – bounce rate. Google defines bounce rate as the percentage of people who leave your site from the entrance page without interacting. Although high bounce rate is also affected by poor site design and irrelevant content, load speed is still a key element because people have become impatient.
HTTPS and HTTP/2
Google ranks secure pages higher than insecure ones, for the sake of protecting customers. However, HTTPS slows pages down, causing problems with one and two (It is also very important to keep security certificates up to date as many people will leave a site immediately if they get a security certificate error). Let’s take a closer look at how exactly CDN services affect HTTPS.
CDN speeds up the implementation of HTTPS, mitigating the effect on load speed. “Edge” servers can handle the SSL/TLS handshake, reducing connection latency. To implement this smoothly, you need to choose a provider that explicitly offers a secure CDN, ideally using the newer HTTP/2 protocol, which is designed to be even more secure.
Dwell Time
The time people spend on your site is increased by ensuring that every page you have loads quickly. Implementing CDN is a faster way to do this than going through and optimizing every single page on your site. Track your time on site durations – you want an average of one minute or higher. Anything less than that indicates that even if people are not bouncing right off your site, they are not sticking around. The longer somebody stays on your site, the more likely you are to get a conversion.
Optimized Images
CDN allows you to optimize your images. This is not just important for page speed, but because about 63% of Google image search clicks turn into site traffic. Depending on your niche, you may get a high rate of traffic from image searches – and image rankings also take load speed into account. Obviously, this is more effective for some industries than others, but it is important enough that marketers should not ignore it. Having striking images helps, using a CDN helps make sure people see them.
As you can see, CDN integration is important for any company that operates outside its local area and vital for companies with global operations. It is cheaper than running your own servers in other locations, but will provide your customers with the same impact. CDN improves page speed and optimizes image load times, which in turn reduce bounce rates and improve dwell time – all of which will see your website load faster.
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