Business owners and decision-makers understand the value of the work they do but often aren’t informed of the impact it has. When it comes to looking beyond conversions, often digital carbon footprints are larger than anticipated because stakeholders aren’t aware [or informed] about the exact implications of their website design. Here are some of the ways the web is contributing to CO2 emissions:
- SEO tools storing, hosting, and maintaining [countless] keyword variations
- Large files requiring vast amounts of energy for transmission across the Internet.
What you should know
- Approximately 8,000 data centres currently exist, with the average one taking up 100,000 square feet of space
- Storing data in servers produces heat, consequently requiring energy to cool them down, resulting in high CO2 emissions
- As a result, if the internet was a country, it would be the world’s seventh largest emitter of CO2 pollution and responsible for one of the biggest carbon footprints.
When businesses optimise their search performance through SEO practices, they often increase the amount of energy required to store and host their content. However, there is a solution to lower this – green SEO.
Thanks to the efforts of climate-conscious organisations like [very fittingly] GreenSEO, Green SEO is gaining real momentum in the marketing world. But isn’t a trend, it’s a necessity. Green SEO isn’t only about optimising your website, but also your business practices and values. The bottom line is you don’t have to compromise on the quality of the user experience to have a more positive impact – we’ll show you how.
What is green SEO?
“Green SEO strategies focus on creating valuable, relevant, and high-quality content that attracts organic traffic over time.” Luke
Simply put, it’s the practice of implementing sustainable best practices to optimise website content, whilst consuming as little non-renewable energy as possible.
What are the benefits of green SEO?
Green SEO creates a less energy-intensive website and lowers the amount of emissions produced.
Not only is green SEO better for the planet, but it’s also good for:
- Optimising your website for the right audience, attracting relevant users
- Ensuring a faster-loading and smoother-operating website.
Which contributes to…
- Creating a positive user experience on your site
- Retaining more visitors, boosting your engagement metrics, and increasing conversions.
These combined efforts can help you achieve sustainable growth in the search engines.
Our SEO Specialists, Luke and Fernando, have shared some of their top tips for implementing green SEO. Read on for their [insightful] top tips.
Top tips for green SEO
1. Review the page speed
Web pages that take a long time to load also consume the most energy, but with some technical SEO and a few simple steps, you can make your pages more efficient. Aim to reduce image sizes and archive unused files and pages, so your pages aren’t storing redundant or unnecessarily large files. Remember, bigger isn’t particularly better when it comes to image size, so aim for as small as possible, but no larger than 2MB [as an absolute limit].
2. Switch to green hosting
Hosting your website with a green provider means that it runs exclusively on sustainable energy. This doesn’t compromise the efficiency and speed of your website. Instead, it means the servers, routers, and cooling systems are run on either sun, wind or sea-powered electricity, as opposed to coal or oil burning.
Green hosting is very widespread and accessible, making it an easy step towards a more energy-efficient website.
3. Target your activities
By targeting your website to the right audience, less time and energy is wasted by users searching for unrelated information. Making the search process more efficient [and cutting bounce rates] means that users spend less time browsing unsuccessfully on mobile and desktop. The less they scroll, the less energy they consume as a result, so keyword targeting plays a crucial role in green SEO.
4. Optimise your pages
Optimising your website to make it mobile-friendly, easy to navigate and properly structured also goes hand-in-hand with an enhanced user experience. For example, optimising your images first, rather than loading them straight to your website from your camera, ensures they are of a higher quality. But this also allows you to compress the file size, so they’re less energy-intensive to load.
Behind the scenes, you should also be utilising coding best practices and minimising unnecessary scripts. This means that your code is clean and fewer server loads are required, which is particularly important when testing new pages.
5. Regularly review and maintain your site
Lastly [but not least], there’s a very simple principle that lies at the heart of green SEO: be proactive. By conducting regular content audits, you can archive redundant content and remove unused pages, refreshing your copy and images as you go. This is where partnering with Ketchup for green SEO services can give you an advantage.
How can Ketchup help you implement green SEO?
With our [skilful] SEO, website design and development experts, we can implement the best practices for green SEO in digital marketing.
It all begins with a free audit to see the good and bad [and the ugly] practices on your current website, before outlining how we can enhance your current content to align with green SEO.
Learn more about sustainability at Ketchup, or request your free website audit.
