Google's Algo Heavily Weights Page Speed: Here's What It Means for Brands and Everyone Else

Google gave the open web plenty of warnings that they would change their algorithms to prioritize fast mobile scores. Now those warnings are very much a part of the new reality that is reshaping distribution opportunities.

By acquiring Lighthouse, Google drastically changed the way they measure the open web. The scores are shocking the tech industry and exposing how flawed the WordPress/Drupal/custom CMS paradigm is. The changes required to get good scores require an entirely new approach, not just a few fast fixes. We wrote a guide to understanding the new scores here.

Here's a story in just a few images.

National Geographic (who I love, don’t get me wrong) is a media company clearly struggling with page speed. Their mobile score of six is quite common for media companies competing under the new scoring rules.

United Airlines’ Hub runs on RebelMouse, where page speed and performance is our obsession. Their score is double what BuzzFeed, The New York Times, and others get. And, as you can see, it’s more than 10x better than NatGeo.

What the industry has yet to connect the dots on is that this now impacts who wins in organic search rankings.

That piece of content in position one was created by a United Airlines customer as part of a competition to win free airline miles. It’s beating local media companies and national media companies on not just that search phrase, but several permutations of the phrase.

Brands have an opportunity right now to win big with super-fast experiences that aren't loaded with ads. They have an opportunity to tap into their customers to have them be their content creators in return for access and privilege that is cost-effective for brands to give away.

Media companies are finding themselves unable to update their tech stack in time. On top of all these problems, they’re burdened with ads that slow down their pages further.

Smart brands have already realized that the future of their marketing is in accepting that they are media companies, whether they like it or not. Brands are either great new media companies or really bad, old media companies. The brands who get it are positioned to win — not just in creating real connections with their customers, but in winning search and social and competing with media companies.

But everyone — publishers as well as brands — desperately needs the right platform to build their business on, which is why we are growing so quickly.

Read more here!