Results
- In just about 5 months, the client saw an increase of 40% for their organic traffic to one site, and 16% in another.
- The Core Web Vital Operation lead to an increase in their mobile score from 38 and 53 to 88 and 96 respectively.
- The Core Web Vital Operation lead to an increase in their desktop score from 80 and 90 to 97 and 96 respectively.
About the Client
Founded in 1974, O’Connor Tax Reduction Experts is the largest property tax consulting firm in the United States. O’Connor’s team are experts in the areas of property tax, cost segregation, and commercial and residential real estate appraisals. The company coordinates more lawsuits and settles more binding arbitration cases than any other tax consulting firm in the nation.
O’Connor utilizes its websites to drive traffic into the company’s sales funnel. Recently, O’Connor management has not been impressed with the subpar loading times on some of the company’s websites. Specifically, the two domains named for this case study are poconnor.com and cutmytaxes.com.
Case Goals
POconnor.com performs functions such as property tax calculation, property locating, and data aggregation. Due to the nature of O’Connor’s services on the website, speed is vital. With over 10,000 pages attached to the domain, optimization was sorely needed.
Despite being well-known and trusted by countless previous clients, O’Connor Tax Reduction Experts understood that its websites could be better optimized for page speed with an end goal of increasing organic traffic.
What Are the Core Web Vitals?
Core Web Vitals are a set of specific factors that Google considers important in a webpage’s overall user experience. They focus on three main aspects:
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): Measures the loading performance of a webpage. It tracks how long it takes for the largest visible content element (like an image or a block of text) to fully load. A good LCP score is 2.5 seconds or less.
- First Input Delay (FID): Measures interactivity. It gauges the time from when a user first interacts with a page (like clicking a link or tapping a button) to the time when the browser is able to respond to that interaction. A good FID score is less than 100 milliseconds.
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): Measures visual stability. It quantifies how much the layout shifts during the loading phase of a webpage, which can lead to a poor user experience. A good CLS score is less than 0.1.
These metrics help webmasters understand how well their site performs in terms of user experience, and improving these scores can lead to better engagement and higher rankings in search results. You can also learn more about the core web vitals from our blog.
Case Solutions
O’Connor hired Techna Digital Marketing to overhaul the company’s Core Web Vitals. Techna has over 20 years of experience helping businesses grow. The team’s strategy in this particular case was to boost O’Connor’s speed through the optimization of Core Web Vitals.
Techna focused on three of the most impactful CWVs that boost a site’s speed: Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), First Input Delay (FID), and Cumulative Layout SHift (CLS). These three Core Web Vitals all play into your Chrome User Experience Report, which Google pulls from to decide your placement on the search page.
For more details on these Core Web Vitals, check out our past blog post!
Case Results and Conclusion
As the data suggests, the optimization of Core Web Vitals had a noticeable effect on the amount of individual visitor sessions recorded for both poconnor.com and cutmytaxes.com.
Whereas both websites were poorly rated beforehand—in fact, they were failing—the optimization of the Core Web Vitals significantly bumped up the desktop scores and more than doubled the domains mobile ratings. The client’s sites experienced more than a 16% and 40% increase in organic traffic, respectively. These metrics were measured across the same time frame, one year apart.
Figure 1. YOY Comparison of POConnor.com Organic Sessions during the period Feb 1-May 31,2022 vs Feb 1-May 31,2021
Figure 2. YOY Comparison of CutMyTaxes.com Organic Sessions during the period Feb 1-May 31,2022 vs Feb 1-May 31,2021
Figure 3. Timeline of the Core Web Vitals Optimization Work
Table 1. Before Vs. After PageSpeed Insights Score
It is apparent from the above numbers that core web vitals optimization can provide a significant boost in organic search traffic. More importantly, it solves paint points of organizations like O’Connor who focus on user experience to facilitate an easier sign-up process for prospective customers.
Techna’s team observed two trends worth noting:
- There seems to be a correlation between better ratings for both core web vitals & increased organic traffic.
- Attaining better mobile and desktop scores has a greater positive impact on traffic than passing only in one and failing in the other.
Conclusion
Optimization of Core Web Vitals for both mobile and desktop site designs is necessary to reap the full SEO benefits and attract more visitors. The speed and smoothness of a website’s assets and loading processes not only betters the user experience, but encourages Google to rank said domains higher up on the engine’s search results.