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Author: Ilan Shabad

  • How to Find Broken Links in Screaming Frog: A Step-by-Step Guide

    Broken links silently erode your site authority, waste crawl budget, and frustrate users. Screaming Frog is the fastest way to find and fix them. Here is exactly how I do it across enterprise sites with tens of thousands of pages.

    Why Broken Links Matter for SEO

    Every broken link on your site is a dead end for both users and search engine crawlers. When Googlebot hits a 404, it wastes crawl budget that could be spent discovering and indexing your valuable content. Broken internal links also leak PageRank into nowhere, weakening the authority distribution across your site. For large eCommerce catalogues and enterprise sites, this compounds quickly — I’ve seen sites with thousands of broken links haemorrhaging authority without anyone noticing. Fixing them is one of the most impactful quick wins in a technical SEO audit.

    Step 1: Configure Screaming Frog for a Broken Link Audit

    Open Screaming Frog and before you crawl, go to Configuration > Spider and ensure “Check External Links” is ticked. This tells the crawler to check both internal and external links for broken responses. For large sites, set the crawl speed to a reasonable rate (2–5 URLs per second) to avoid overloading your server. Set the user agent to Googlebot to see exactly what Google sees.

    Step 2: Run the Crawl

    Enter your domain URL and hit Start. For a site with 10,000 pages, expect the crawl to take 15–30 minutes depending on your settings. Screaming Frog will systematically follow every link on every page, recording the HTTP status code for each URL it encounters. Let it run to completion — partial crawls miss broken links buried deep in your site architecture. If you’re new to the tool, read our beginner’s guide to Screaming Frog first.

    Step 3: Filter for Client Error (4xx) Responses

    Once the crawl completes, go to the Response Codes tab and filter by “Client Error (4xx)”. This shows you every URL that returned a 404 Not Found, 410 Gone, or other 4xx error — these are your broken links. The most important column here is “Inlinks”, which tells you how many pages on your site link to each broken URL. Prioritise fixing broken links with the most inlinks first, as these have the greatest impact on your site architecture and authority flow.

    Step 4: Export and Prioritise

    Right-click the filtered results and export to CSV. Sort by inlinks descending to prioritise the highest-impact fixes first. For each broken link, click on the URL in Screaming Frog and check the “Inlinks” tab at the bottom — this shows you exactly which pages contain the broken link, making it easy to locate and fix them efficiently.

    Step 5: Fix or Redirect

    For each broken link, you have three options: update the link to point to the correct URL if the content has moved, set up a 301 redirect from the broken URL to the most relevant live page, or remove the link entirely if the content no longer exists and there’s no suitable replacement. For enterprise sites, I typically set up 301 redirects in bulk using a redirect mapping spreadsheet — it’s faster and more systematic than manually editing hundreds of pages.

    Pro Tips From a Decade of Broken Link Audits

    Schedule monthly crawls. Broken links accumulate constantly as content is updated, products are discontinued, and external sites go offline. Also check for soft 404s — pages that return a 200 status code but display a “page not found” message. These are invisible to standard broken link checks but just as damaging. Screaming Frog can detect these if you configure custom extraction rules to look for common 404 page text patterns. Addressing these issues regularly is part of solid crawl error management in Google Search Console.

  • Why Most Content Strategies Fail (And How to Fix Yours)

    Most businesses have a blog. Few have a content strategy. There’s a massive difference between occasionally publishing articles and building a systematic content engine that drives compounding organic growth. Here’s why most content strategies fail — and how to build one that actually works.

    Publishing Without a Plan

    The most common mistake is publishing content without a clear strategic framework. Random blog posts on random topics don’t build topical authority. Google rewards websites that demonstrate deep expertise in specific subject areas. Without a content plan built around topic clusters and pillar pages, you’re leaving rankings on the table — no matter how well-written your articles are.

    Targeting the Wrong Keywords

    Many businesses target high-volume, high-competition keywords and wonder why they never rank. A smarter approach is to start with long-tail keywords where you can realistically compete, then gradually build authority to target broader terms. Map keywords to buyer intent stages so your content serves people at every point in their journey — from awareness through to conversion.

    Ignoring Search Intent

    Creating a sales page for an informational query — or an educational article for a transactional one — is a reliable recipe for poor rankings. Before creating any content, analyse the search results to understand what Google considers the right format and depth for that query. Match the intent precisely. This single discipline separates the sites that rank from the ones that don’t.

    Never Updating Old Content

    Content isn’t a set-and-forget exercise. Pages that ranked well two years ago may have slipped as competitors published better content. Regular content audits and refreshes are often the fastest path to traffic growth — far faster than publishing new content. Update statistics, add new sections, improve formatting, and strengthen your internal linking.

    Weak Technical Foundations

    Even the best content won’t rank if your site has serious technical issues. Crawlability problems, slow page speed, poor mobile experience, and duplicate content can all hold your content back from reaching its potential. Before investing heavily in content creation, make sure you have a solid technical base. A technical SEO audit is a smart first step.

    How to Fix Your Content Strategy

    Start with a comprehensive content audit. Map your existing content against target keywords and identify gaps. Build topic clusters around your core services. Create an editorial calendar with clear priorities. Measure performance monthly and iterate. If you want expert support, our content strategy service covers the full process — from keyword research through to content production and ongoing optimisation.

    The businesses that treat content as a strategic asset — not an afterthought — are the ones that build compounding organic growth over time. Treat your website like a publication, not a brochure.

  • 5 Link Building Mistakes That Are Hurting Your Rankings

    Link building remains one of the most powerful — and most misunderstood — aspects of SEO. While high-quality backlinks can dramatically boost your rankings, the wrong approach can lead to penalties and lost visibility. Here are five common mistakes I see businesses making, and what to do instead.

    1. Buying Links From Link Farms

    It’s tempting: pay a few hundred dollars and get 50 backlinks overnight. But Google’s algorithms are sophisticated enough to identify unnatural link patterns. Links from low-quality, irrelevant websites don’t just fail to help — they actively harm your site. Google’s link spam updates specifically target these tactics, and the penalties can take months to recover from.

    2. Ignoring Relevance

    A link from a high-authority site means very little if it has no topical relevance to your business. A DR90 cooking blog linking to your accounting firm looks unnatural to Google. Focus on earning links from websites in your industry or closely related fields. Relevance is increasingly the deciding factor between links that move the needle and links that don’t.

    3. Over-Optimising Anchor Text

    If every backlink pointing to your site uses the exact same keyword-rich anchor text, that’s a red flag. Natural link profiles have diverse anchor text — branded terms, naked URLs, generic phrases, and occasionally keyword-rich anchors. Aim for a natural distribution that reflects how real people link to content they find genuinely useful.

    4. Neglecting Internal Links

    Many businesses focus entirely on external link building while ignoring their internal linking structure. Internal links distribute authority throughout your site, help search engines understand your content hierarchy, and improve user navigation. A deliberate internal linking strategy amplifies the value of every external link you earn — it’s one of the highest-ROI technical SEO activities available to you.

    5. Not Tracking Your Link Profile

    If you’re not regularly auditing your backlink profile, you could be accumulating toxic links without knowing it. Competitors can even point spammy links at your site in what’s known as negative SEO. Use tools like Ahrefs or Google Search Console to monitor your link profile and disavow harmful links promptly. Pair this with a regular technical SEO audit to keep your full site health in check.

    The Right Approach to Link Building

    The best link building strategy is straightforward: create content worth linking to, build genuine relationships in your industry, and earn links through value — not manipulation. If you want hands-on support building a sustainable link profile, our link building service is designed to do exactly that.

  • How to Rank in Google’s Local Map Pack: A Complete Guide

    The Google Map Pack — those three local business listings that appear at the top of local search results — drives more calls, visits, and leads than any other local search feature. If your business serves a geographic area, ranking here should be your top priority.

    What Determines Map Pack Rankings?

    Google uses three primary factors for local rankings: relevance (how well your business matches the search query), distance (how close your business is to the searcher), and prominence (how well-known and trusted your business is online). Understanding these three levers is the foundation of any effective local SEO strategy.

    Optimise Your Google Business Profile

    Your Google Business Profile (GBP) is the foundation of local SEO. Complete every field: business categories, services, products, attributes, hours, and description. Add high-quality photos regularly. Post updates weekly. Respond to every review — positive and negative. Enable messaging and Q&A. An incomplete profile is leaving local visibility on the table.

    Build Consistent Citations

    Your business name, address, and phone number (NAP) must be identical across every online directory. Inconsistencies confuse Google and hurt your local rankings. Audit your citations across major directories, data aggregators, and industry-specific platforms. Even small discrepancies — a different phone format or abbreviated street name — can create signals Google struggles to reconcile.

    Generate and Manage Reviews

    Reviews are a major ranking factor for local search. Develop a systematic process for requesting reviews from happy customers, and respond to every review thoughtfully. The quantity, quality, and recency of your reviews all matter. A steady stream of recent, positive reviews tells Google your business is active and trusted by real customers.

    Create Local Content

    Build location-specific landing pages and blog content that demonstrates your expertise in your service area. Mention local landmarks, suburbs, and community events naturally. This signals to Google that you’re genuinely embedded in the local community. Pair this with a strong content strategy and proper structured data markup to maximise your local visibility.

    The Long Game

    Local SEO is a long game, but the businesses that commit to it consistently will dominate their local market for years to come. If you want expert support with your local presence, our local SEO service covers the full strategy — from GBP optimisation through to citation building, review management, and local content creation.

  • SEO vs AEO: What Australian Businesses Need to Know in 2026

    The search landscape has fundamentally shifted. While traditional SEO remains critical for driving organic traffic, a new discipline — Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO) — is reshaping how businesses need to think about visibility online. Here’s what Australian businesses need to understand in 2026.

    What’s Changed?

    Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and other AI-powered search tools are now answering questions directly. Instead of showing ten blue links, they synthesise information and present a single answer — often without the user ever clicking through to a website. For businesses that relied purely on ranking in position one, this is a wake-up call. Being cited as the source in an AI-generated answer is becoming just as important as ranking in traditional results.

    SEO Is Not Dead

    Let’s be clear: SEO is far from dead. Organic search still drives the majority of website traffic for most businesses. Technical SEO, on-page optimisation, link building, and content strategy remain foundational. What’s changed is that SEO alone is no longer sufficient for maximum visibility. You need to optimise for both traditional search and AI-powered answer engines.

    How AEO Complements SEO

    AEO builds on strong SEO foundations. Structured data, clear content hierarchies, authoritative sourcing, and comprehensive topic coverage all help AI systems identify and cite your content. If your SEO is solid, adding an AEO layer can dramatically expand your visibility across the new search ecosystem — appearing in AI-generated results that potentially serve millions of queries per day.

    What Should You Do?

    Start by auditing your current SEO performance. Then assess whether your content is structured in a way that AI tools can easily parse and cite. Focus on clear, factual answers to common questions in your industry. Use structured data to help machines understand your content. Build topical authority through comprehensive content clusters. And make sure your technical foundations — canonicalisation, page speed, crawlability — are all in order.

    Where to Start

    The businesses that invest in both SEO and AEO now will be the ones dominating search — in all its forms — for years to come. Our AEO consulting service is specifically designed to help Australian businesses build this dual-channel visibility. Or, if you’re starting with the basics, our SEO consulting service is the right first step.

  • Google AI Overviews: What Marketers Need to Know in 2026

    What Are Google AI Overviews?

    Google AI Overviews are AI-generated answer summaries that appear at the top of Google Search results for certain queries. Instead of clicking through to a website, users get a direct answer synthesised from multiple sources, right on the search results page. They represent a fundamental shift in how Google serves results and are now shown on millions of searches daily — and this is only expanding.

    How Google AI Overviews Work

    Google’s AI Overviews use large language models to understand query intent, retrieve relevant content from multiple sources, synthesise information into a coherent cited answer, and display it with source attribution at the top of results. The model draws on the same web content that populates traditional results — authoritative, well-structured, comprehensive sources tend to be cited most frequently.

    The Impact on Click-Through Rates

    AI Overviews reduce direct click-through rates for some queries. Studies show sites appearing in AI Overviews often see a dip in traffic from those queries. However, being cited increases brand visibility and authority perception, users who do click through are often higher-intent and more qualified, and citations drive indirect benefits like brand awareness and link generation. If you’re thinking about the broader picture of SEO vs AEO, AI Overviews are precisely why AEO is becoming non-optional.

    Which Queries Show AI Overviews?

    Informational queries (What is X? How do I…?), comparison queries (X vs Y), definition queries, and list queries (Best X, Types of Y) most commonly trigger AI Overviews. Transactional and navigational queries rarely show them, as users have clearer intent. This means content-heavy sites — blogs, guides, FAQs — are most affected, which is all the more reason to have a strong content strategy designed for this environment.

    How to Optimise Your Content for AI Overviews

    1. Answer questions directly. Put your answer in the first 100–150 words. AI systems extract and synthesise direct answers. If your answer is buried in lengthy prose, the AI may overlook your content entirely.

    2. Use clear formatting. AI systems parse content structure effectively. Use clear heading hierarchies, short paragraphs, numbered and bulleted lists, and bold text for key terms.

    3. Implement FAQ schema. FAQPage schema explicitly tells Google which content is Q&A formatted. This significantly improves the chances your content appears in AI Overviews. See our guide to structured data and schema markup for implementation instructions.

    4. Build topical authority. Google’s AI system favours sources it perceives as authoritative. Create comprehensive coverage of your topic area, link related articles internally, and earn backlinks from reputable sources.

    5. Demonstrate E-E-A-T. Show expertise, experience, authority, and trustworthiness explicitly. Include author credentials, publishing dates, and evidence of your authority in your topic.

    SEO Strategy for the AI Overview Era

    The strategic shift is from optimising purely for clicks to optimising for citations. Optimise for being cited, not just for clicks. Build topical authority across comprehensive topic clusters. Answer questions directly and clearly. Use structured data aggressively. Prioritise content quality and expertise over keyword volume. And make sure your technical SEO foundations are strong enough that Google can reliably crawl and understand your content.

    Key Takeaways

    Google AI Overviews are reshaping search. They reduce direct traffic for some queries but increase authority and brand visibility. Optimise your content by answering questions directly, using structured data, demonstrating expertise, and building topical authority. The SEO game is shifting from clicks to citations — the businesses that adapt now will have a significant advantage.

    Optimise for AI Overviews

    Let’s position your content to be cited in Google AI Overviews. Book a consultation.

  • Beginner’s Guide to Using Screaming Frog for SEO Audits

    Screaming Frog SEO Spider is the single most important tool in any technical SEO toolkit. I’ve used it on every client engagement since 2014. Here is everything you need to know to get started — and the features most beginners miss.

    What Is Screaming Frog?

    Screaming Frog SEO Spider is a desktop website crawler that analyses URLs in real time. It crawls your site the same way Google does — following links, reading HTML, and collecting data on every page it finds. The free version crawls up to 500 URLs. The paid licence (currently around GBP 239 per year) removes that limit and unlocks advanced features like JavaScript rendering, custom extraction, and crawl scheduling.

    Installing and Setting Up

    Download Screaming Frog from screamingfrog.co.uk and install it — it runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux. Before your first crawl, I recommend adjusting a few settings. Go to Configuration > Spider and tick “Check External Links” and “Crawl Outside of Start Folder” (only if you want to check subdomains). Under Configuration > Speed, set the max threads to 2–5 for your first crawl to prevent overloading your server.

    Running Your First Crawl

    Enter your homepage URL in the top bar and click Start. Screaming Frog will begin crawling your site page by page, following every internal link it finds. As it runs, you’ll see data populating in real time across multiple tabs: Internal, External, Response Codes, Page Titles, Meta Descriptions, Headings, Images, and more. Each tab gives you a different lens into your site’s health.

    The Key Tabs Every Beginner Should Check

    Response Codes — Filter by “Client Error (4xx)” to find broken pages. Any 5xx errors indicate server problems needing immediate attention. This tab is also essential for a broken link audit.

    Page Titles — Filter by “Missing”, “Duplicate”, or “Over 60 Characters” to quickly identify title tag issues across your entire site. Title tags remain one of the strongest on-page ranking signals.

    Meta Descriptions — Filter by “Missing” or “Duplicate”. While meta descriptions don’t directly affect rankings, they heavily influence click-through rates from search results.

    H1 Headings — Filter by “Missing” or “Duplicate”. Every indexable page should have exactly one unique H1 that includes your target keyword.

    Images — Filter by “Missing Alt Text” to find images without alt attributes, which are important for accessibility and image SEO.

    Advanced Features Worth Learning Early

    Custom Extraction — Under Configuration > Custom, you can set up XPath or CSS selectors to extract specific data from every page. I use this to check for structured data, verify tracking scripts, or confirm that certain elements exist across thousands of pages.

    JavaScript Rendering — If your site uses JavaScript frameworks (React, Angular, Vue), enable JavaScript rendering under Configuration > Spider > Rendering. This tells Screaming Frog to render pages like a browser rather than reading raw HTML — critical for auditing modern web applications.

    Crawl Comparison — Save your crawl data and compare it against future crawls to track changes over time. This is invaluable for monitoring the impact of site migrations, redesigns, or large-scale SEO changes.

    How I Use Screaming Frog on Client Engagements

    Screaming Frog is the first tool I open on every new engagement. A full crawl gives me a comprehensive baseline of site health within minutes. I combine crawl data with Google Search Console, Google Analytics, and backlink data to build a complete picture of where the site stands and where the biggest opportunities lie. Monthly re-crawls then track progress and catch new issues before they compound. If you want to understand how this fits into a full audit process, read my guide on how to conduct a technical SEO audit.

  • Structured Data and Schema Markup: A Beginner’s Guide

    Structured data is one of the least understood areas of technical SEO — and one of the most rewarding when you get it right. It doesn’t directly boost your rankings, but it gives Google the context it needs to display your content in enhanced, visually rich formats in the search results. Done well, it can significantly increase your click-through rate without moving a single position.

    What Is Structured Data?

    Structured data is a standardised format for providing information about a page and classifying the content on it. In plain terms, it’s a way of adding extra information to your webpage in a format that search engines can clearly understand — not just the text on the page, but what that text means and what type of content it represents. The most common vocabulary is Schema.org — a collaborative project supported by Google, Bing, Yahoo, and Yandex.

    What Is Schema Markup?

    Schema markup is structured data implemented using Schema.org vocabulary. It’s typically added in one of three formats: JSON-LD, Microdata, or RDFa. Google strongly recommends JSON-LD — it’s a separate block of code that sits in the <head> or <body> without being mixed into your HTML, making it easier to add, modify, and troubleshoot.

    What Are Rich Results?

    Rich results are enhanced search results that display additional information beyond the standard blue link and meta description: star ratings and review counts, product pricing and availability, FAQ accordions that expand in the SERP, recipe cards, event listings with dates and venues, and breadcrumb trails. Rich results attract significantly higher click-through rates — they take up more visual space, build trust at a glance, and stand out from competing results.

    The Most Useful Schema Types for Most Businesses

    LocalBusiness — Explicitly tells Google your business name, address, phone number, and opening hours. Reinforces your local SEO signals and helps ensure your information is displayed correctly in local search results and Google Maps. Pairs naturally with a strong local SEO strategy.

    FAQPage — Can cause your result to expand in the SERP to show questions and answers without the user even visiting your site. This dramatically increases your SERP real estate and is increasingly relevant as Google AI Overviews become more prominent.

    Article / BlogPosting — Helps Google understand the structure and authorship of your content. Particularly useful for building E-E-A-T signals by explicitly identifying the author, their credentials, and the article’s subject matter.

    Product — For e-commerce sites, Product schema enables price, availability, and review information to appear directly in search results. One of the most commercially significant rich result types available.

    Person — For consultants, coaches, authors, and professionals. Explicitly identifies you as an individual with a specific expertise and job title, contributing to the knowledge graph signals Google uses to assess authority.

    How to Implement Schema Markup

    On WordPress, the simplest approach is an SEO plugin. Rank Math and Yoast SEO both offer built-in schema functionality. For more control, write JSON-LD directly and test using Google’s Rich Results Test to verify your markup is valid and eligible for rich results. Structured data issues will often surface in a technical SEO audit — so if you haven’t done one recently, that’s a good starting point.

    What Structured Data Won’t Do

    Structured data does not directly improve your rankings. It helps Google understand your content and makes you eligible for rich results, but it doesn’t add ranking signals the way backlinks or content quality do. Rich results are also not guaranteed — even with valid structured data, Google makes its own decision about whether to show them. Eligibility is necessary but not sufficient.

    Bringing It All Together

    Structured data is the finishing layer of technical SEO — it sits on top of a well-crawled, well-indexed, fast, mobile-friendly site. If those fundamentals aren’t in place, schema markup won’t move the needle. But once your technical foundation is solid, it’s one of the highest-leverage improvements you can make to increase visibility and click-through rates from organic search. For the full picture, start with The Complete Guide to Technical SEO.

  • Mobile-First Indexing: What It Means for Your Website

    If you’ve built your website primarily with desktop users in mind, you may be unknowingly putting yourself at a significant disadvantage in Google’s search results. Since completing the rollout of mobile-first indexing across all websites, Google now uses the mobile version of your website as its primary source for indexing and ranking — not the desktop version. How your site performs on a small screen isn’t just a user experience concern. It’s a ranking concern.

    What Is Mobile-First Indexing?

    Mobile-first indexing means that when Google’s crawler visits your website, it primarily uses a smartphone user agent rather than a desktop one. Google began rolling this out in 2018 and completed the full rollout for all websites in 2023. If your mobile site has the same content, structure, and signals as your desktop site, mobile-first indexing makes no difference. The problem arises when there’s a gap between what mobile and desktop users see.

    What Mobile-First Indexing Means in Practice

    The most important implication: if content, structured data, or other signals exist only on your desktop site and not on your mobile site, Google may not see or credit them. For sites using responsive design, this is typically not a problem. The risk is primarily for sites with separate mobile subdomains or dynamic serving where different HTML is delivered based on user agent.

    Common Mobile-First Indexing Issues

    Content hidden on mobile — Google can access content hidden behind tabs or accordions. However, if entire sections of content are simply absent from the mobile HTML, that content won’t be indexed. Use the URL Inspection tool in Search Console and select “Test Live URL” to see how Googlebot views your page on mobile.

    Mobile site has less content than desktop — On sites with separate mobile URLs, it’s common for the mobile version to be stripped down. Since Google is indexing the mobile version, leaner content is what’s being evaluated for ranking purposes. If your desktop pages have rich content and your mobile pages have half that, you’re only getting credit for the mobile version.

    Structured data only on desktop — If you’ve implemented schema markup on your desktop pages but not on your mobile pages, Google won’t see it. This affects your eligibility for rich results — star ratings, product information, FAQs.

    Poor mobile page speed — A page that loads in 2 seconds on desktop might take 6 seconds on a mobile device on 4G. Since Google assesses the mobile experience, poor mobile speed directly affects your Core Web Vitals scores. Always test using PageSpeed Insights with a focus on the mobile score. For a deeper guide, read our post on how to improve page speed for SEO.

    Intrusive interstitials — Google has an explicit policy against intrusive interstitials on mobile — pop-ups that cover the main content shortly after landing. These are treated as a demotion signal.

    How to Check Your Mobile SEO Health

    Open Google Search Console and check the Mobile Usability report — it flags specific pages with issues like text too small to read or clickable elements too close together. Use the URL Inspection tool to see how Google’s mobile crawler views individual pages. Use Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test for a quick pass/fail assessment. Running a full technical SEO audit will surface any mobile issues alongside every other factor affecting your visibility.

    The Best Approach: Responsive Design

    If you’re building or redesigning a website today, responsive design is the right approach — one set of HTML delivered to all devices, with CSS handling the layout. This eliminates the content parity problem entirely, ensures consistent structured data, and simplifies maintenance. Google explicitly recommends responsive design as the preferred implementation for mobile-first indexing.

    Continue with the Technical SEO Series

    Mobile-first indexing connects directly to Core Web Vitals, page speed, and structured data. Start with The Complete Guide to Technical SEO for the complete picture, or explore the individual guides on Core Web Vitals, page speed, and structured data.

  • How to Improve Page Speed for SEO

    Page speed has been a confirmed Google ranking factor since 2010 for desktop and 2018 for mobile. But its importance goes far beyond rankings. A slow website loses visitors — often before they’ve read a single word. And visitors who leave immediately send negative engagement signals back to Google, which can suppress your rankings further. It’s a cycle that’s hard to escape once you’re in it.

    Why Page Speed Matters for SEO

    Speed is part of the broader “page experience” signal. Google has been clear that content relevance will outweigh page experience in most cases — but in competitive niches where several pages are closely matched on quality, speed becomes a tiebreaker. More significantly, speed affects user behaviour. Even a one-second delay increases bounce rates meaningfully. Users on mobile — the majority of web traffic — are particularly sensitive to load times, which is directly tied to mobile-first indexing.

    How to Measure Your Page Speed

    Start with Google PageSpeed Insights (pagespeed.web.dev). It shows Core Web Vitals scores for both mobile and desktop, plus specific recommendations. Crucially, it shows both lab data and field data from real Chrome users. Google Search Console’s Core Web Vitals report shows which pages are rated Good, Needs Improvement, or Poor across your site. WebPageTest.org gives you a detailed waterfall chart of every request — useful for identifying exactly what’s causing delays.

    The Most Impactful Page Speed Improvements

    Optimise Your Images

    Images are almost always the largest contributor to page weight. Use modern formats like WebP or AVIF (25–35% smaller than JPEG/PNG). Compress images without visible quality loss. Serve images at the dimensions they’ll actually be displayed — don’t upload 3000px wide images and scale down in browser. Use loading=”lazy” for below-fold images. Don’t lazy-load your hero image — this will hurt your LCP score.

    Improve Server Response Time

    Time to First Byte (TTFB) is how long your server takes to respond. Google’s threshold is under 800ms, with under 200ms being ideal. Common causes of slow TTFB: poor hosting infrastructure, slow database queries, no server-side caching. Moving to better hosting, implementing caching, and optimising database queries are the usual fixes.

    Implement Caching

    Caching stores a pre-built version of your pages and serves them directly to users without rebuilding from scratch each time. For WordPress, use WP Rocket, W3 Total Cache, or LiteSpeed Cache. Browser caching tells returning visitors’ browsers to store static assets locally so they don’t re-download on subsequent visits.

    Eliminate or Defer Render-Blocking Resources

    Render-blocking resources are JavaScript and CSS the browser must download and process before displaying any content. Non-critical CSS can be deferred or loaded asynchronously. JavaScript that doesn’t need to run before the page displays can be given the defer or async attribute. Critical CSS can be inlined directly in the HTML to avoid an additional request.

    Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)

    A CDN stores copies of your static assets on servers distributed around the world, serving them from the location closest to each user. Cloudflare has a free tier that handles the basics well. For businesses with national or international audiences, a CDN can make a meaningful difference to load times.

    Minimise Third-Party Scripts

    Third-party scripts — analytics, chat widgets, social sharing buttons, ad scripts — are a common cause of slow pages. Each is an additional request to an external server you have no control over. Audit what’s on your site and ask whether each script delivers enough value to justify its performance cost. Load non-critical scripts asynchronously and review what’s active regularly.

    A Note on Mobile Speed

    Always test and optimise for mobile first. A page that loads in 2 seconds on desktop broadband might take 6 seconds on a mid-range mobile on 4G. Always check your PageSpeed Insights scores on mobile — they’re typically significantly lower and tell a more realistic story about what most users experience.

    Continue with the Technical SEO Series

    Page speed is closely tied to Core Web Vitals and mobile usability — all within the broader framework of technical SEO. Explore the other guides covering crawl errors, XML sitemaps, canonicalisation, and structured data.