Posted by larry.kim

This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of Moz, Inc.

Today, I’ll share with you a case study on how we used remarketing to make our content marketing and SEO efforts up to seven times more effective. In the last two years, we’ve moved beyond just doing SEO to kicking some major online marketing butt and I’d love to show you the lessons we’ve learned in the time it took to get here. Hopefully you can cut your own learning curve and get right to it!

Rockin’ SEO and the company no one knows

WordStream’s website launched late in 2008. My company is pretty much your typical B2B brand using content marketing and SEO to drive leads for the business. Today, our blog gets around half a million visitors each month; we’ve seen a compound monthly growth rate of 8.4% every month, for the last five years!

Here’s what that looks like:

At first glance, you might consider this a huge SEO success (doesn’t everything look better if you only take a glance?). As you might expect though, we’ve faced a few challenges over the last few years:

Issue 1: Low visitor engagement

Here’s what it looked like over a 60-day period last year, back when we had pretty weak user engagement metrics:

• Just 1.9 pages per visit.
• An average visit duration of 1 minute and 34 seconds.
• A new visitor ratio of 79.2%.

We knew we could do better than this… yet we weren’t.

Issue 2: Low conversion rate

Our second challenge had to do with low conversion rates from website visitors to offer sign-ups. Like many other companies that do SEO/Content Marketing, we’re hoping to turn some of that traffic into offer sign-ups for things like white papers or free trials. We want to get interested prospects into our system so we can communicate with (and market to) them on a regular basis.

Unfortunately, our conversion rates were pretty low–just under 2%–as people were bouncing away and often not returning. I don’t care how great you are at getting eyes on your content; if you’re not converting, it’s worthless.

Issue 3: Virtually no branded searches

This one was probably our biggest problem. In organic search, only 3% or so of our approximately half a million monthly organic searches were branded searches. Check out this snapshot from last year, back when “not provided” was only around 10% and it was still possible to do this kind of analysis.

(Let’s just stop here briefly, shall we? We must have a moment of silence for our lost organic keyword data.)

Okay, we’re back… have a look:

I’m sure we’ve all seen our share of clueless clients, where 95% of the organic search traffic is branded search. I wouldn’t want to see all branded search; it means your SEO sucks if you’re only appearing in front of people who are already looking for your business by name.

My site was the exact opposite. We were driving hundreds of thousands of visits per month via SEO and only 3% of that came from branded search. What does that mean? It meant our SEO had gotten too far ahead of the brand.

On the one hand, it’s great to have growing SEO traffic numbers. However, as I pondered the issues above—low engagement, low conversion and very little branded search—I realized the situation was more like:

(image via Flickr)

Essentially, we were just driving tons of traffic to my link-juiced up domain using the amazing, optimized content we’d created, but people wouldn’t stay that long, convert, or remember the company brand.

That’s not a good thing at all. It’s pretty anti-climactic, actually; you do the work of creating killer content, optimizing it for both users and search, get it out the door and in front of the right people… and they still have no idea who you are. We had to stop throwing money out the door. We couldn’t just be SEOs anymore.

Remarketing primer for the uninitiated

Remarketing is basically the process of tagging people who visit your site, then targeting them with banner ads after they leave your site. No, this is not otherwise known as stalking—not if you’re doing it right, anyway. Remarketing can be a very powerful tool, if you avoid crossing over into the creep factor.

It gives you the opportunity to appear in front of people who had already expressed an interest in your brand as they go about their business on the web. They could be checking their email, reading the news, watching a YouTube video… and there you are! Reminding them of that thing they were going to do when they checked you out a few days ago.

Why remarketing?

We did a lot of thinking about our issues and how to fix them. We were totally killing it with our SEO and driving traffic like no one’s business, but clearly, that wasn’t enough.

Remarketing was actually one of the first potential solutions I considered seriously, because by definition, remarketing provides opportunity to:

• Turn abandoners/bouncers into leads
• Increase brand recall (and thus increase branded searches)
• Increase repeat visitor rates and engagement
• Increase the effectiveness of SEO and content marketing

What we needed was to better connect with the people who were interested in visiting us in the first place. Obviously, we weren’t excelling at grabbing and keeping their attention, but then, we weren’t getting the chance to follow up with this mass of search traffic.

Remarketing would allow us a second chance to make that first impression, if you will (and even a third, and a fourth). We had to get past being forgettable. We had to get sticky.

And why remarket with Google, you ask? Why not? Quite simply, they were the largest and most recognized marketplace going; they just made sense for us. The Google Display Network is one of the largest remarketing networks in the world, with over two million sites in the network. It also includes AdMob for mobile targeting, meaning you can get your ads to show up in Angry Birds and other mobile apps.

Generally you can find your tagged site visitors on the network many times per day, several days per week, and across many different sites. On average, you’ll be able to connect with:

• 84% of the people you tag
• 10-18 times per month

Soon, Google DoubleClick users will also be able to buy retargeting ads on Facebook, which is proving an incredibly effective platform for the tactic.

Remarketing as a Conversion Rate Optimization Tool

According to research from Forrester, 96% of people who visit your site don’t convert to a lead or sale. And 70% of people who put stuff in a shopping cart leave without placing an order. These people really are the low hanging fruit and from that perspective, I view remarketing as an effective conversion rate optimization tool—sort of.

This was another major reason retargeting made sense for us. We really needed that help with brand recognition and getting people back to our site to convert (or at least get back on site and connect so we could nurture the lead).

So, with the decision made to at least try it out and test, we got started.

Important things to consider when starting remarketing

In remarketing, you usually need to create different audiences to remarket so you can adjust your bidding strategy and your ads. For example, we created one audience for people who visited our blog, one for home page visitors and another for people who visited one of our free tools (e.g.: Our Google AdWords Grader for PPC auditing). We can assume each of these high-level groups was looking for different types of information.

This basic segmenting allowed us to show different ads, depending on which section of our site they visited.

A secondary benefit was that we could bid more aggressively (get more impressions, higher more prominent ad positions) for visitors to our AdWords Grader, which is worth way more to us as a business than someone who visits our blog (because we blog about all sorts of random stuff that has nothing to do with WordStream there, intent is far lower, if at all).

Another cool remarketing strategy for content marketers is to define audience categories based on the different post categories in your blog. If you already have a ton of blog content that is classified by topic, leverage those existing classifications in your remarketing audience definition strategy.

Also, consider membership duration; that is, how long do you want to keep chasing these people around the Internet? I set ours to 30-60 days, which is pretty aggressive (you might even call it spammy). A shorter membership duration would improve cost per conversion metrics, since people are less likely to convert as more time passes. Also, consider the difference you might see between B2C and B2B. You know the length of your average sales cycle and will have to test to see if it’s worth going beyond that time, or if they’re apt to have completed a purchase.

Remember:

• Create audiences, groups of visitors based on the pages they visited or other factors.
• Bid more aggressively on visitors who showed greater intent.
• Segment your audiences based on the different content topics on your site
• Test against the length of your sales cycle as a starting point to finding the right audience membership duration.

Killer ad creative strategy for remarketers

Now that we’ve tagged visitors and segmented them into different audiences, the key is to create cool ads in different formats that:

• Drive a call to action.
• Feature branding or images that will improve brand recall.

Lousy ads have sunken many remarketing efforts, so the key is to keep A/B testing with different ad designs. You want to have a high CTR (ideally more than 0.4%) and find the most memorable copy and image combinations, since one of the objectives here is to improve brand recall. You know you have finally “made it” when you get people tweeting your ads! Like this cute little puppy dog!

Another company killing it with their remarketing ads right now is none other than Moz, who has some of the cutest remarketing ads featuring the amazing Roger Mozbot!

Remarketing results 18 months out

We started our remarketing efforts early in Q1 2012, just over 18 months ago. How are things going today? Based on the title of the post, you know this was the best move we could have made, but how big was the impact?

Impact on brand recall

One of the biggest issues I had was poor brand recall – that a measly 3% of my organic searches were branded searches. Unfortunately, the whole keyword (not provided) mess makes it pretty much impossible to trend this branded searches over time [shakes fist at Google], however a proxy for brand recall is direct traffic. Meaning, to the extent that you’re building your brand, you would expect more people to visit your website directly, as opposed to stumbling upon your SEO’ed content. Here’s what my direct traffic looks like over last 6 years.

Impact on repeat visitor rate

Earlier, I mentioned that last January, we had a 20% returning visit rate. Today, it’s more like a 33% of our visitors are repeat visitors. That’s a massive over 50% improvement. We love to see the steady increase in repeat visitors (decrease in new visitors) over time.

Impact on user engagement and conversion rates

Check THIS out. Remember that ridiculous 1 minute and 33 second average visit duration? Today, it’s up 300% and is approaching 5 minutes. Furthermore, our website visitor-to-lead-form-submitted conversion rates are up 51%!

It’s important to note there was one other major factor that helped us here with the huge increase in visit duration and that was to embrace longer form content. Both were important for the overall strategy and I’ll write about that in a future post.

Repeat visitors +50%, conversion rate +51%, and and time on site +300% = 7x more awesome!

A few closing notes on our remarketing strategy:

Basically, we buy a truckload of impressions ever month. Around 44 Million of them per month—take a look below—I allocate my PPC budget 50/50 between search and display remarketing.

Why so much remarketing? At this point, we’re already generating hundreds of thousands of visitors to the site every month via SEO and content marketing, so it’s worth that much more to the business to convert the organic traffic we’re getting. I think this is very common among sites that do SEO well.

As we’ve gotten better and better at driving traffic via SEO, our PPC search strategy today is much more about getting additional ad space coverage around a very narrow set of high commercial intent keywords, which have lots of ads crowding out the organic results.

It’s important to note that my “7x More Awesome” metric was our ROI from remarketing as we specifically sought to improve engagement rates, brand recall and conversion rates – if you choose to test remarketing for your business, the ROI will depend on your goals and objectives.

Remarketing: moving beyond SEO towards building your brand

In summary, SEO is a great traffic acquisition method, but by definition, you’re going after people who are unfamiliar with your brand (since if they knew where to get whatever they were looking for, they would have directly navigated to your site).

In order to grow your business into a more mature company, you need to go beyond just SEO and build your brand!

Remarketing is an incredibly effective way to leverage and capitalize on your SEO and content marketing investments to build:

• more repeat visitors,
• more brand recall (branded searches, direct traffic),
• more engagement (pageviews per visit, time on site, lower bounce rates)
• and more conversions/leads/sales.

Personally, I think it’s crazy to be doing SEO without at least some remarketing. No, it’s not free, but neither is SEO/Content Marketing. The point is to understand where each tactic is most effective and how they work best together to drive audiences, then convert/retain to get way more bang for your buck. Like Rand has said, we can’t just be SEOs anymore!

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Posted by jamesporter

The John Lewis Christmas 2013 campaign has smashed it virally. Since it launched two weeks ago it’s had:

• 8 million views on YouTube
• 150k Twitter mentions
• 70k Facebook interactions

As content marketers, those kind of engagement statistics seem incredible. Admittedly, brand marketers have much bigger budgets, but as content marketers, what can we learn from brand marketers about creating, launching and promoting content?

If you’re in the UK, then you will undoubtedly have seen it, but for everyone else, here’s the video:

If you’re a bit skeptical and think that content marketing and big brand marketing are totally different, then read this quote from industry marketing bible The Drum:

“Shares are the currency of social success and for leading brand marketers discovering how to create and distribute highly shareable content repeatedly and at scale is now at the top of their wish list.”

Sounds familiar, right? Basically big brand marketing and content marketing are converging.

Hopefully you’ve bought into the idea that we’re becoming the same industry…so what can we learn?

Lesson 1: Don’t launch on your own site (launch where your target market is)

John Lewis is a big brand, but they didn’t launch their campaign on their site. They launched their campaign via Twitter and YouTube.

Why? Because that’s where their target market is, that is where they are going to get traction with their audience, and that is where they have the highest chance of virality.

Lesson: Could you launch your content where your target market is? A great example of this happening in the SEO community is Stephen Pavlovich’s Definitive Guide To Conversion Rate Optimisation. It’s a fantastic piece of content that was launched on Moz and helped to build Stephen’s name in the industry.

Pro Tip 1: If you’re worried about losing link equity, use the cross domain rel=canonical tag to transfer value back to your site.

Pro Tip 2: If you can’t get your content onto a platform where your target audience is, can you use paid promotion to get your content on there?

Lesson 2: Don’t make links your main objective

We all want more links. But at Distilled we’re now optimising campaigns for other metrics as well.

Question: Would you rather build your brand with new audiences or would you prefer a link from a DA30 site on a page that nobody ever visits and that provides zero referral traffic?

Lesson: Set your content objectives not purely on links or views, but on other levels of engagement. Still factor in links but consider other metrics like sharing, data capture, brand uplift, or online purchases/enquiries.

Lesson 3: Target your content broadly

When you’re creating content at the level of John Lewis, then arguably your audience is the entire population.

As content marketers, we’ve got narrower audiences, but there’s a fine line between targeting your content too broadly:

and targeting your content too narrowly:

Lesson: Make sure that the audience that you are targeting for your content piece is large enough to achieve your objectives. Otherwise you have failed from the start.

Pro Tip 1: If you’re worried about the reach of your target audience, try and combine several audiences into one content piece. Wiep Knol in his Searchlove 2010 presentation (no longer available, unfortunately) gave a great example of combining several target audiences with his piece the “70 Most Beautiful Churches In Europe,” which brought the travel blogging and religious communities together.

Pro Tip 2: Another way you can target content more broadly is geographically. Bingo site TwoLittleFleas has used a US/UK switch on their quiz to broaden their potential audience from 63m (UK population) to 377m (US and UK population).

Pro Tip 3: Another way of targeting your content is including many niche audience groups within a piece of content. This works as the piece of content speaks to pre-existing communities, and their automatic thought when seeing the piece is “that’s for me!.”

The “From Gospel to Grunge: 100 Years of Rock” piece is not just for people interested in music, it also references various music communities and that will encourage people to engage with the piece.

Lesson 4: Build influencers into your content

John Lewis has embedded an influencer with a massive online community directly into their content. Lily Allen is singing on the ad, which is a pretty clever play from John Lewis considering that she’s got 4.3m followers on Twitter.

Lesson: Build influencers into your content launch plan. Ask them to contribute or comment, give them a free trial, or offer them beta access.

Pro Tip: When doing outreach, find people who you can help out. This changes the mindset from “what can this person do for me” to “how can I help this person” (great tip from Marco Montemagno at SearchLove 2013).

Lesson 5: Focus your marketing on innovators/opinion leaders

Hat tip to Seth Godin (and his Purple Cow) for this one. Why did John Lewis launch their campaign online, even though TV is the primary channel? Because online is where innovators and opinion leaders hang out. These are the people that are on the lookout for something new or different. Innovators and opinion leaders have the ability to change the behaviour of the early and late majority.

Lessons: Opinion leaders matter. Use this process from Richard Baxter to find the influencer intersect for your market, and then build relationships with these people as a long term strategy for success in your space.

Lesson 6: Get your creative right (people need to love your marketing)

Didn’t you know? Google and other social networks (particularly Facebook), are filtering content through to you based on what they think you’ll like. Just because you’re publishing content doesn’t mean your audience is getting it. (not convinced, read this book).

If other people are reading and sharing though, then your content is likely to get through the filters. So people really do need to love your marketing for it to work.

So, how can you get your creative up to scratch?

If you’re just starting out with content marketing, then there are a few things you need to do first:

• Manage expectations and educate internally that content marketing plays like this can fail.
• Do something small first that requires limited budget. Build confidence. Get buy in from the C-suite. THEN go big!

Pro Tip 1: Mitigate risk. Offset some of the risks of content marketing by emulating the fundamentals of a piece that has ALREADY been successful in a different geographical location or industry.

Pro Tip 2: Need creative inspiration? Check out this great post from Kelsey Libert on creative ideation, or this classic from Larry Kim “How I got a link from the Wall Street Journal“.

Lesson 7: Spend more on outreach than you are spending on content creation

The John Lewis campaign cost £7m. £6m is going to promotion (advertising). £1m went to creative.

What ratios are you working on in terms of spend on content creation to outreach? The loud and clear message here is that in brand marketing outreach isn’t an afterthought. It’s fundamental to the campaign.

Lesson: Double your outreach budget. Do outreach yourself? Spend twice the amount of time on it for your next project.

Lesson 8: Keep your content non-promotional (but plan for sales post-launch)

If people feel that they are being sold to, they are less likely to share. So keep your content as non-promotional as possible.

Lesson: For your next piece of content, strip out your sales focused header and footer, and remove the sales spiel and the ‘buy’ call to action. This is an example piece of content marketing for Simply Business. As you can see, the content, sharing and utility of the piece is the main focus, not any specific marketing or commercial messages.

Pro Tip: Add remarketing tags to your content so you can promote to your audience at a later date (even if it’s just to promote your next content piece).

Lesson 9: Are you creating a reaction with your audience?

What reaction are you stirring up in your audience? Is it curiosity, surprise, sorrow or pride?

Interestingly, John Lewis adverts are deliberately sad and they evoke an emotional reaction with their choice of music and the story.

Lesson: At the concept stage, if your concept doesn’t evoke a visible reaction with a small group of users, consider it a no-go. No reaction = No social shares.

Conclusion

As content marketers, we know a lot of the strategies and tactics that brand marketers are using. But there’s a big difference between knowing what to do, and actually doing it.

In my opinion, there’s still a lot we can learn from brand marketers, specifically in terms of strategy, scale, reporting and measurement, and ultimately in the results they get. I’m excited about the way that our two industries are converging.

If you need more inspiration here are a list of resources that I follow to keep up to date with the creative digital sector, and of how I keep up to date with what people love online:

Ads/PR/content making waves:

• Top 20 Most Shared Ads of 2013
• AdAge Viral Video Charts (updated each week)
• Adage Creativity Pick (updated daily)
• Adweek Adfreak
• PR Examples (sign up for the email newsletter)

• Buzzsumo (my new favourite tool for find out what’s big on any website. It’s fast, low on bugs and gives you accurate share counts for facebook, G+ and Twitter)

Hope you enjoyed the piece, if you’ve got any examples of great content marketing or brand marketing that have blown you away, drop them in the comments. Would love to see them.

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Posted by nathalienahai

All marketers hope to see their audiences move down their marketing funnel, eventually converting to paying customers. We reach out through social media, we create content that we hope resonates, and we optimize our sites in hopes of eliciting certain behaviors from those customers. Psychology, then—the study of mental functions and behaviors—is a foundational part of what we do.

In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Nathalie Nahai—the web psychologist—explains some of the more fundamental aspects of people’s behavior online, offering insight into ways we can improve our efforts to reach them.

For reference, here’s a still of this week’s whiteboard!

Video Transcription

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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Posted by Zoompf

This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of Moz, Inc.

Back in August the team at Zoompf published a joint research study with Moz analyzing How Website Speed Actually Impacts Search Ranking. In this research, a surprise result showed no clear correlation between page load time and search ranking. This confounded us, since we expected to see at least some small measure of correlation, especially after Google announced in 2010 that site speed would have a partial impact on search ranking. We did, however, observe a correlation between “Time to First Byte” and search ranking, and we delved into more detail in our follow-up post.

In these two articles, it was noted by our readers that while page load time may not appear to directly impact search ranking, it still has an obvious impact on user experience and will likely have an increasing impact on search ranking in the future. In other words, page load time should still be considered a priority to the success of your site.

But how big of a priority is it really? Of course it depends: The slower your site is now, the greater your user experience lags behind your competitors. Additionally, the more traffic your site receives, the more benefit you’ll receive from performance optimization (we’ll dig into that more below).

The good news is that, unlike the impact on search ranking, there is a wide body of independent research showing clear causation between improved site performance and increased conversion rates, user engagement, and customer satisfaction. It also just makes sense—we’ve all visited slow websites, and we’ve all bailed out when the page takes too long to load. On mobile we’re even less patient.

What may be surprising, though, is just how big of an impact a slow performance can have on your conversions. Let’s look at that first.

The research

Back in 2006, Amazon presented one of the first studies linking a clear causation between page load time and online customer revenue, summarized in Greg Linden’s presentation Make Data Useful. Through A/B testing, Greg showed every 100 millisecond delay in page rendering time resulted in a 1% loss of sales for Amazon.

In more recent research, Intuit presented findings at Velocity 2013 from their recent effort to reduce page load time from 15 seconds to 2 seconds. During that effort, they observed a dramatic increase in conversions for every second shaved off their page load time, in a stair step that decreased with increasing speed. Specifically:

• +3% conversions for every second reduced from 15 seconds to 7 seconds
• +2% conversions for every second reduced from seconds 7 to 5
• +1% conversions for every second reduced from seconds 4 to 2

So in other words there was tremendous value in the initial optimization, and diminishing value as they got faster.

In another recent report, Kyle Rush from the 2011 Obama for America campaign site showed through A/B testing that a 3-second page time reduction (from 5 seconds to 2 seconds) improved onsite donations by 14%, resulting in an increase of over $34 million in election contributions.

In fact, there’s a wide body of research supporting clear economic benefits of improving your site performance, and clearly the slower your site is, the more you have to gain. Additionally, the higher your traffic, the larger the impact each millisecond will yield.

How fast should I be?

Whenever we talk with people about web performance, they always want to know “How fast should I be?” Unfortunately this one is hard to answer, since the result is subjective to your business goals. Those in the performance industry (of which, full disclosure, Zoompf is a member) may push you to hit two seconds or less, citing research such as that from Forrester showing that 47% of users expect pages to load in two seconds or less.

We prefer a more pragmatic approach: You should optimize to the point where the ROI continues to makes sense. The higher your traffic, the more monetary difference each millisecond gained will make. If you’re Amazon.com, a 200-ms improvement could mean millions of dollars. If you’re just launching a new site, getting down to 4-6 seconds may be good enough. Its really a judgment call on your current traffic levels, where your competition sits, your budget, and your strategic priorities.

The first step, though, is to measure where you stand. Fortunately, there’s a great free tool supported by Google at WebPageTest.org that can measure your page load time from various locations around the world. If you receive a lot of international traffic, don’t just select a location close to home—see how fast your site is loading from Sydney, London, Virginia, etc. The individual results may vary quite a bit! WebPageTest has a lot of bells and whistles, so check out this beginner’s guide to learn more.

Where do I start?

Improving the performance of your site can seem daunting, so it’s important you start with the low hanging fruit. Steve Souders, the Head Performance Engineer at Google, has famously stated:

“80-90% of the end-user response time is spent on the front-end. Start there.”

This has come to be called the Performance Golden Rule. In layman’s terms, this means that while optimizing your web server and database infrastructure is important, you will get a higher return on your time investment by first optimizing the front-end components loaded by your users’ browsers. This means all the images, CSS, JavaScript, Flash and other resources linked as dependencies from your base HTML page.

You can see the Performance Golden Rule well illustrated in a typical waterfall chart returned by tools like WebPageTest. Note how the original page requested is a very small subset of the overall time. Generating this original base page is where all the back-end server work is done. However, all the other resources included by that page (images, CSS, etc.) are what take the large majority of the time to load:

So how can you speed up your front-end performance and reap the rewards of a better user experience? There are literally hundreds of ways. In the sections below, we will focus on the high-level best practices that generally yield the most benefit for the least amount of effort.

Step 1: Reduce the size of your page

Bloated content takes a long time to download. By reducing the size of your page, you not only improve your speed, you also reduce the used network bandwidth for which your hosting provider charges you.

An easy optimization is enabling HTTP compression, which can often reduce the size of your text resources (HTML, CSS, and JavaScript) by 50% or more. WhatsMyIP.org has a great free tool to test if compression is turned on for your site. When using, don’t just test the URL to your home page, but also test links to your JavaScript and CSS files. Often we find compression is turned on for HTML files, but not for JavaScript and CSS. This can represent a considerable potential performance boost when your server is configured for compression properly. Keep in mind, though, you do NOT want your images to be compressed by the server as they are already compressed. The extra server processing time will only slow things down. You can learn more in this detailed guide on what content you should compressing on your website.

If you find your server is not using compression, talk to your server admin or hosting provider to turn it on. Its often a simple configuration setting, for example see the mod_deflate module for Apache, IIS 7 configuration docs, or this article on enabling on WordPress sites.

In addition, images can often contribute to 80% or more of your total page download size, so its very important to optimize them as well. Follow these best practices to cut down your image size by 50% or more in some cases:

• Don’t use PNG images for photos. JPEG images compress photographs to significantly smaller sizes with great image quality. For example, on Windows 8 launch day, the Microsoft homepage used a 1 megabyte PNG photograph when a visually comparable JPEG would have been 140k! Think of all the wasted bandwidth on that one image alone!
• Don’t overuse PNGs for transparency. Transparency is a great effect (and not supported by JPEG), but if you don’t need it, you don’t always need the extra space of a PNG image, especially for photographic images. PNGs work better for logos and images with sharp contrast, like text.
• Correctly set your JPEG image quality. Using a quality setting of 50-75% can significantly reduce the size of your image without noticeable impact on image quality. Of course, each result should be individually evaluated. In most cases your image sizes should all be less than 100k, and preferably smaller.
• Strip out extraneous metadata from your images. Image editors leave a lot of “junk” in your image files, including thumbnails, comments, unused palette entries and more. While these are useful to the designer, they don’t need to be downloaded by your users. Instead, have your designer make a backup copy for their own use, and then run the website image versions through a free optimizer like Yahoo’s Smush.It or open source tools like pngcrush and jpegtran.

Lastly, another good way to reduce your page size is to Minify your Javascript and CSS. “Minification” is a process that strips out the extra comments and spaces in your code, as well as shortening the names of functions and variables. This is best seen by example:

Example: Original Javascript

 /* ALERT PLUGIN DEFINITION
  * ======================= */
  var old = $.fn.alert
  $.fn.alert = function (option) {
    return this.each(function () {
      var $this = $(this)
        , data = $this.data('alert')
      if (!data) $this.data('alert', (data = new Alert(this)))
      if (typeof option == 'string') data[option].call($this)
    })
  }
  $.fn.alert.Constructor = Alert

Minified Version (from YUI Compressor):

var old=$.fn.alert;$.fn.alert=function(a){return this.each(function(){var c=$(this),b=c.data("alert");if(!b){c.data("alert",(b=new Alert(this)))}if(typeof a=="string"){b[a].call(c)}})};

Your minified pages will still render the same, and this can often reduce file sizes by 10-20% or more. As you can see, this also has the added benefit of obfuscating your code to make it harder for your competitors to copy and modify all your hard earned work for their own purposes. JSCompress is a basic easy online tool for Javascript, or you can also try out more powerful tools like JSMin or Yahoo’s YUI compressor (also works for CSS). There’s also a useful online version of YUI which we recommend.

Step 2: Reduce the number of browser requests

The more resources your browser requests to render your page, the longer it will take to load. A great strategy to reduce your page load time is to simply cut down the number of requests your page has to make. This means less images, fewer JavaScript files, fewer analytics beacons, etc. There’s a reason Google’s homepage is so spartan, the clean interface has very few dependencies and thus loads super fast.

While “less is more” should be the goal, we realize this is not always possible, so are some additional strategies you can employ:

• Allow browser caching. If your page dependencies don’t change often, there’s no reason the browser should download them again and again. Talk to your server admin to make sure caching is turned on for your images, JS and CSS. A quick test is to plug the URL of one of your images into redbot.org and look for the header Expires or Cache-Control: max-age in the result. For example, this image off the eBay home page will be cached by your browser for 28,180,559 seconds (just over 1 year).

Cache-Control is the newer way of doing things, but often times you’ll also see Expires to support older browsers. If you see both, Cache-Control will “win” for newer browsers.

While browser side caching will not speed up the initial page load of your site, it will make a HUGE difference on repeat views, often knocking off 70% or more of the time. You can see this clearly when looking at the “Repeat View” metrics in a WebPageTest test, for example:

• Combine related CSS and JS files. While numerous individual CSS and JS files are easier for your developers to maintain, a lesser number of files can load much faster by your browser. If your files change infrequently, then a one time concatenation of files is an easy win. If they do change frequently, consider adding a step to your deploy process that automatically concatenates related groups of functionality prior to deployment, grouping by related functional area. There are pros and cons to each approach, but there’s some great info in this StackOverflow thread.
• Combine small images into CSS sprites. If your site has lots of small images (buttons, icons, etc.), you can realize significant performance gains by combining them all into a single image file called a “sprite.” Sprites are more challenging to implement, but can yield significant performance gains for visually rich sites. See the CSS Image Sprites article on w3schools for more information, and check out the free tool SpriteMe.

Step 3: Reduce the distance to your site

If your website is hosted in Virginia, but your users are visiting from Australia, it’s going to take them a long time to download your images, JavaScript and CSS. This can be a big problem if your site is content-heavy and you get a lot of traffic from users far away. Fortunately, there’s an easy answer: Sign up for a Content Delivery Network (CDN). There are many excellent ones out there now, including Akamai, Amazon CloudFront, CloudFlare and more.

CDN’s work basically like this: you change the URL of your images, JS and CSS from something like this:

http://mysite.com/myimage.png

to something like this (as per the instructions given to you from your CDN provider):

http://d34vewdf5sdfsdfs.cloudnfront.net/myimage.png

Which then instructs the browser to look out on the CDN network for your image. The CDN provider will then return that image to the browser if it has it, or it will pull it from your site and store for reuse later if it doesn’t. The magic of CDNs is that they then copy that same image (or javascript or CSS file) to dozens, hundreds or even thousands of “edge nodes” around the world to route that browser request to the closest available location. So if you’re in Melbourne and request an image hosted in Virginia, you may instead get a copy from Sydney. Just like magic.

To illustrate, consider the left image (centralized server) vs. the right image (duplicated content around the world):

In closing

While front-end performance does not currently appear to have a direct impact on search ranking, it has a clear impact on user engagement and conversions into paying customers. Since page load time also has a direct impact on user experience, it is very likely to have a future impact on search ranking.

While there are many ways to optimize your site, we suggest three core principles to remember when optimizing your site:

1. Reduce the size of your page
2. Reduce the number of browser requests
3. Reduce the distance to your site

Within each of these, there are different strategies that apply based on the makeup of your site. We at Zoompf have also introduced several free tools that can help you determine which areas will make the biggest impact, and we also support a free tool to analyze your website for over 400 common causes of slow front-end performance. You can find them here: http://zoompf.com/free.

Happy hunting!

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