It’s increasingly common these days to hear about the environmental impact of digital technology. The websites we visit every day are hosted on servers that require a lot of energy to keep these sites online, running, and doing what we ask them to do. There’s now also a conversation around how when you optimize your SEO, you can also do your part to help save the environment, but could this actually be true?
SEO, or natural referencing
SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is the natural referencing of a website. This refers to all the actions put in place in order to appear as quickly as possible in the results of search engines such as Google, Bing, Ecosia, Qwant, etc. By optimizing natural referencing, or SEO, it is possible to more easily reach customers who do not know your business, but are looking for a service or product like yours. According to several studies, the first three results coming out in search engines get a 60% click-through rate, and therefore a chance of being visited by a potential customer. It is therefore imperative to pay particular attention to the optimization of its SEO. But, in addition to improving visibility on search engines, can SEO also protect the environment?
SEO helps reduce energy consumption!
Yes! Optimizing referencing does indeed consume less energy and therefore contributes to the protection of the environment. How? There are a couple parts to the answer.
1. By offering relevant results and reducing the time spent on search engines
We know that optimizing your natural referencing is done by implementing all the actions or referencing techniques in order to be able to appear early in the search engines. In addition to being well positioned, you gain visibility, but the user also benefits from it: their search is quick and relevant, thus, the energy consumption used by the search engines to deploy the results is reduced. The less time we spend on search engines, the less energy it takes for search engines to display results.
2. By improving load time
The actions taken to optimize SEO are numerous, and allow you to both gain visibility and to improve the loading time of your site. Indeed, search engine algorithms take into account certain factors for their search ranking including:
- If the visuals of the site are sufficiently compressed to be as light as possible
- If there aren't too many videos on the site. The more videos there are, the slower the loading time will be, because a video, even a short one, has significant size.
- If the source code is well organized. When a site is created, it is possible that certain sections, or elements put in place are no longer used in the end, but nevertheless still appear in the source code. It is important to check that the source code is well organized and cleaned of any unused line of code so as not to impact the loading time of your site.
Storing this data requires significant energy consumption. For the search engine giant Google, sites requesting too much energy consumption in relation to the relevance of the information displayed on their pages are therefore penalized and will appear late in the search results.
SEO is therefore an element that should not be overlooked in the design of your website. You gain visibility, user searches are more relevant, and energy consumption is reduced, which in other words, allows you to do your part in the protection of the environment.
At Bigflow, we take care to optimize your website as much as possible when it comes to SEO and therefore do our best to help in environmental protection, too. 🌱
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