MARKETING
Increase Revenue with Speed Optimization [Local SEO Case Study]
The author’s views are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz.
Last year, I pitched a series of technical SEO topics for local SEO on twitter and got lots of positive feedback.
One of these elements of technical SEO that can feel extremely daunting and unfamiliar to local SEOs is speed optimization.
There are some key scenarios when local SEOs should seriously consider speed optimization, even for a small local client. After all, these clients are still impacted by the issues that come along with having a slower website — such as higher bounce rates, lower conversions, and worst of all, a poor user experience.
There are also plenty of instances where speed optimization is a practical next step in your SEO strategy. If your client has great content, great links, but low engagement or rankings, speed issues may be the culprit.
This case study is about a client just like that. The only service my team at RicketyRoo provided during the length of the case study was speed optimization, and we saw some impressive results. In this post, I’ll share our experience, and hopefully this inspires you to take on some speed issues you’ve been nervous to address.
The client
The client is a multi-location residential cleaning franchise with over 40 locations across the United States. The website consists of approximately 580 pages, with a landing page for each location.
Our client’s goal is pretty simple: take a bigger piece of the pie from the larger nationwide home cleaning franchises. Our technical audit showed that the site was very slow, so site speed is where we started.
Our methodology
1. Set up staging environment with WPEngine
Whether you’re using tools and plugins or choose to manually update the website for speed, you should create a staging (or test) environment. Making manual changes to the code that a website is built with (even through a plugin) can break a website. A staging environment is a cloned version of the production site that can be tinkered with without the risk of breaking anything on the live site. Once you have a staging site set up, you can essentially update and change any elements you would like and test without fear of your client losing traffic or leads.
Our speed philosophy is to test and verify. Verifying that the staging site is still functional after making a change and then getting an updated score through the speed tool of your choice is the only way to be confident about the changes you are making.
2. Run through a tool like WebPageTest
During this stage, you’re diagnosing issues such as script files returning 404 errors, unused CSS files causing longer load times, and render-block resources. Find these issues and update them. Web.dev is a great resource for finding solutions:
1. Review Core Web Vitals scores to determine where issues lie.
2. Find out what’s taking the longest amount of time from the waterfall
3. Review render-blocking resources and update (deferring them is likely the best call here)
3. Check to see if anything is broken
This is why we’re using a staging environment — just in case any of these changes we’ve made breaks something. Check out the live staging site and compare the visual and functionality to the production version of the site. If everything is working as expected, then you’re doing great.
4. Review large images via WebPageTest
The Largest Contentful Paint issues are often caused by images that are too large. There are many guides on how to optimize images out there. If you’re using WordPress, you can also use a plugin like Imagify:
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Download any large images, resize, and reduce space
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Reupload images at smaller sizes
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Check image resolution on staging site
5. Rinse and repeat for other page templates
Everything we’ve done so far we’ll repeat for every template type used on the site. Most sites will have separate templates for location pages, services, categories, blogs, products, contact pages, etc. Each of these page types should be reviewed with a tool like WebPageTest.
6. Install WP Rocket
If your site is on WordPress, you can use WP Rocket to further optimize your site for speed. WP Rocket can sometimes have issues with other plugins or themes used on WordPress sites, so it’s important to test on the staging site first.
7. Review plugins
While we’re on the topic of plugins, you should also review your current plugins and deactivate and remove any that are not in use.
8. Check to see if anything is broken
We’ve made a decent amount of changes at this point. We should review the live version of the staging site again and compare it to the production site.
9. Run through Webpagetest again
Let’s see how we’ve done! If you’re happy with your results then your work is nearly done.
10. Push changes live
Any changes you made should now be pushed to the production site.
11. Annotate changes in GA
Remember to annotate these changes so that you can check back and draw a conclusion from your results for yourself.
Results
Our speed optimization started in July 2020. Soon after, we saw improvement in rankings for non-branded keywords that already ranked in the top 20 positions. The client saw a 32% increase in new users, a 47% increase in phone calls, and a 63% increase in free quote requests in a year-over-year comparison of 2021 to 2020. 2021 saw a 55%+ increase in revenue over 2019 and over 60% in comparison to 2020.
This correlates with an increase in both site traffic and qualified leads. Our client measures qualified leads as scheduled appointments, which grew by 49% PoP.
We also reviewed the CRux data for our client in comparison to closely-ranked competitors. The winner for each UX/speed element is highlighted in yellow. As you can see, our client’s scores are generally higher than competitors that do not rank as well:
Conclusion
Technical SEO can be done, even if you don’t consider yourself a tech expert. Having a backup makes it easy to test out changes with confidence. Never dismiss the importance of a SEO tactic because you’re unfamiliar. Our client saw ranking and improvements as well as a 55% increase in revenue due to Core Web Vital optimization alone. Now that you have a staging website, you’re free to tackle other technical issues you may have discovered but felt uncomfortable with approaching.
MARKETING
Trends in Content Localization – Moz
Multinational fast food chains are one of the best-known examples of recognizing that product menus may sometimes have to change significantly to serve distinct audiences. The above video is just a short run-through of the same business selling smokehouse burgers, kofta, paneer, and rice bowls in an effort to appeal to people in a variety of places. I can’t personally judge the validity of these representations, but what I can see is that, in such cases, you don’t merely localize your content but the products on which your content is founded.
Sometimes, even the branding of businesses is different around the world; what we call Burger King in America is Hungry Jack’s in Australia, Lays potato chips here are Sabritas in Mexico, and DiGiorno frozen pizza is familiar in the US, but Canada knows it as Delissio.
Tales of product tailoring failures often become famous, likely because some of them may seem humorous from a distance, but cultural sensitivity should always be taken seriously. If a brand you are marketing is on its way to becoming a large global seller, the best insurance against reputation damage and revenue loss as a result of cultural insensitivity is to employ regional and cultural experts whose first-hand and lived experiences can steward the organization in acting with awareness and respect.
MARKETING
How AI Is Redefining Startup GTM Strategy
MARKETING
More promotions and more layoffs
For martech professionals salaries are good and promotions are coming faster, unfortunately, layoffs are coming faster, too. That’s according to the just-released 2024 Martech Salary and Career Survey. Another very unfortunate finding: The median salary of women below the C-suite level is 35% less than what men earn.
The last year saw many different economic trends, some at odds with each other. Although unemployment remained very low overall and the economy grew, some businesses — especially those in technology and media — cut both jobs and spending. Reasons cited for the cuts include during the early years of the pandemic, higher interest rates and corporate greed.
Dig deeper: How to overcome marketing budget cuts and hiring freezes
Be that as it may, for the employed it remains a good time to be a martech professional. Salaries remain lucrative compared to many other professions, with an overall median salary of $128,643.
Here are the median salaries by role:
- Senior management $199,653
- Director $157,776
- Manager $99,510
- Staff $89,126
Senior managers make more than twice what staff make. Directors and up had a $163,395 median salary compared to manager/staff roles, where the median was $94,818.
One-third of those surveyed said they were promoted in the last 12 months, a finding that was nearly equal among director+ (32%) and managers and staff (30%).
Extend the time frame to two years, and nearly three-quarters of director+ respondents say they received a promotion, while the same can be said for two-thirds of manager and staff respondents.
Dig deeper: Skills-based hiring for modern marketing teams
Employee turnover
In 2023, we asked survey respondents if they noticed an increase in employee churn and whether they would classify that churn as a “moderate” or “significant” increase. For 2024, given the attention on cost reductions and layoffs, we asked if the churn they witnessed was “voluntary” (e.g., people leaving for another role) or “involuntary” (e.g., a layoff or dismissal). More than half of the marketing technology professionals said churn increased in the last year. Nearly one-third classified most of the churn as “involuntary.”
Men and Women
This year, instead of using average salary figures, we used the median figures to lessen the impact of outliers in the salary data. As a result, the gap between salaries for men and women is even more glaring than it was previously.
In last year’s report, men earned an average of 24% more than women. This year the median salary of men is 35% more than the median salary of women. That is until you get to the upper echelons. Women at director and up earned 5% more than men.
Methodology
The 2024 MarTech Salary and Career Survey is a joint project of MarTech.org and chiefmartec.com. We surveyed 305 marketers between December 2023 and February 2024; 297 of those provided salary information. Nearly 63% (191) of respondents live in North America; 16% (50) live in Western Europe. The conclusions in this report are limited to responses from those individuals only. Other regions were excluded due to the limited number of respondents.
Download your copy of the 2024 MarTech Salary and Career Survey here. No registration is required.
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