Crawler errors or Page Load Time? What affect more to SEO

[DanielExposito]

Hello,

I have a page with a forum and at this moment the moz report says that have 15.1k of issues like url too long, meta noindex, title too long etc.

But this page have a load time realy sloooow with 11 seconds.

I know i need fix all that errors (i'm working on this) but...

What is more important for SEO? The page load or that type of error like duplicate titles etc.

Thank you!

[effectdigital]

If a page is Meta no-indexed it is extremely, extremely unlikely that Google would list the page within their search results. If a page takes 11 seconds to load,  it is extremely, extremely unlikely that Google would list the page within their search results

I'd approach it like this:

1. Fix high priority tech issues first, such as the page being no-indexed
2. Fix the page-loading speed issues
3. Fix the low priority, more subjective tech issues like a URL being too long, page title length issues etc

In reality until 1 and 2 are fixed there's basically very little chance of the URL ranking or being served. Sometimes you just have to make a decision and get on with it, this is how I'd approach it

[Alex_Ratynski]

Great question Daniel!

Without all the information (which errors you were given) this may be a difficult question to answer.

Because Google doesn't openly share which ranking factors have the most impact or "weight"  the answer to this question is up for debate depending on the SEO. That being said, in my personal experience the most impactful differences on both rankings and more importantly user experience is performance & On-Page optimizations.

Here is how you might prioritize your SEO improvements:

1. Fix any crawling errors first (meta no-index, blocked by robots.txt, etc..)
2. Improve the page speed load time
3. Fix On-Page SEO Issues (Title Tags, Meta Descriptions, etc...)
4. Everything else

My reason for putting it in this order is simply because you want to first make sure search engines can even crawl and index your site. If they can't everything else will be mute.

Next you want to improve speed because if the page truly loads 10+ seconds, then most people will become extremely frustrated and leave. Improving this user experience will not only be better for Google but most importantly your users. Which is the whole reason we have a website after all.

Third I chose On-Page SEO because when you improve your on-page, Google will then be able to clearly see what your page is about and be able to rank it more efficiently. I would suggest focusing on those things in that order first and foremost as it will make the biggest improvements for BOTH your users and rankings.

I hope that helps!

Best, 
Alex Ratynski

[effectdigital]

In exact agreement over the order here