Speed Matters for SEO

In recent years, many of Google’s changes to its much vaunted search algorithm and ranking system have made site speed more important than ever. Essentially, Google wants everything on the web to be faster, and now gives preference to sites that load quickly, especially mobile sites.¹

^‍TurnTo has made improving our clients’ SEO a core performance metric for our four products—Ratings & Reviews, Community Q&A, Visual Reviews, and Checkout Comments. Here’s how:

1. TurnTo’s product widgets are written using an extremely lightweight JavaScript framework for the fastest display rendering.
2. Our JavaScript bundle is one-half to one-quarter the size of our competitors’ and it’s fully optimized for speed.
3. TurnTo’s code libraries dynamically load only what’s needed on a given page, improving browser performance.

The Freshness Factor

Search engines love active pages that are frequently updated. TurnTo’s products capture more content than the competition with innovations like Inbox Submission, which lets shoppers submit product reviews and ratings directly from within the body of an email. Features like this and others provided by TurnTo give your product pages a steady stream of frequent updates. That’s a signal to search engine web crawlers that your page is important and will boost your SEO as a result.

Star Ratings Drive Click-Throughs

TurnTo’s star ratings are fully indexable by search engines. That lets an average star rating for a product on your website show up right on the search engine results page (SERP). A recent study from Conversion XL found that having star ratings appear in search results can improve click-through rates by as much as 35%.²

Lots of Long-Tail Keywords

Some great news about voice of the customer: your customers write product reviews using the same words and phrases that people searching for those products also use. Product reviews embed these long-tail keywords right into your site, with little to no effort on your part.

Long-tail keywords are especially useful to eCommerce sites because they tend to be three- or four-word phrases that are highly specific and indicate that a shopper is close to a purchase. That means your website and product pages will rank higher in search engine results pages for shoppers who are pretty far down the sales funnel and have signaled a strong intent to make a purchase.

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‍Sources:

‍1 Using Page Speed in Mobile Ranking; Google Webmaster Central Blog, January 2018

‍2 Do Review Stars on Google Help Click-Through Rate?; Conversion XL, December 2017

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