We often see people spend weeks or even months on website speed optimization chasing that 100 score in Pagespeed Insights because they think this will make their site magically rank at the top of Google.
Make no mistake, website speed optimization is important, but just like everything else in SEO, it alone won’t give you magical Google rankings by itself. Once you’re passing the Core Web Vitals metrics, obsessing over speed is flawed thinking.
I want to introduce you to a mental model or framework called “The Theory Of Constraints,” which explains why this is the case. Understanding this mental model in detail will help you make a bunch more money with less time and effort!
Once your speed is fast and you pass Core Web Vitals, getting to as fast as humanly possible will probably only generate marginally better returns in rankings, traffic and conversions. This is because the “constraint” is no longer speed. It’s something else like on page SEO or the quality of your content, website backlinks or your conversion elements.
Below, is a snippet from Taylor Pearson’s fantastic article that explains this in detail. It’s well worth a read.
“…. Theory of Constraints which states that any system with a goal has one limit and worrying about anything other than that limit is a waste of resources. Suppose a factory has an assembly line with three sections and two of those sections can produce 100 units per hour while the third can only produce 50 units per hour.
In that case, any investment outside of improving the third section won’t improve the outcome. Doubling the first two to have the capacity to produce two hundred units per hour while the third can only produce fifty, still only produces fifty units per hour.
2 Simple Questions for Getting Unstuck
Once we’ve defined the problem, there are two obvious questions.
What’s the obvious way to improve the limit?
What’s the current limit?”
Applying These Questions To SEO & Google Rankings
Once you understand this mental model it’s easy to apply it to SEO, ranking higher in Google, ChatGPT and or AI search engines and generating more leads, sales and money from a website – on a first pass, it’s a simple case of checking boxes:
- Is my site fast? (i.e. does it pass Google’s Core Web Vitals benchmarks? >> our Core Web Vitals report will tell quickly yes or no)
- Is my site reliable? (i.e. do you have uptime monitoring in place? Our SimpleUptime tool can help you here and our recent guide on how to reduce downtime)
- Do I have a page on my site for every product and service I sell? (we talked about “no page, no rank” is this mailout: https://app.bentonow.com/share/KjbNQL39eG071X)
- Is my onpage SEO on point? (try our free SEO audit tool here)
- Are my title tags and meta descriptions optimized? (here’s how we write meta descriptions and a simple way to optimize title tags for more phone calls)
- Is my Contact Us page optimized
- Am I on Google, Apple & Bing Maps and are all the details correct an up to date?
- Do I have a review funnel in place so I’m getting reviews on autopilot?
- For ecommerce sites, are you setup on Google Shopping & Bing Shopping and is your feed 100% error free?
- Do you have a backlink strategy?