Sustainable strategy: developing an SEO strategy with the environment in mind

With more than 4 billion people actively using the internet, the combined carbon footprint of energy, infrastructure and communication technologies, such as smartphones and computers, totals about 3.7% of greenhouse emissions globally, which is comparable to the airline industry.

Heavy images, poor navigation and irrelevant content on your site cost unnecessary amounts of energy to maintain, as does the crawling of the entire web to make sure new content is found and shown to searchers.

Carmen Dominguez, our Head of Organic, explored how you can develop a sustainable SEO strategy through web caching, reducing image sizes, reviewing site structure and pages, reducing clicks, reviewing your sitemap and removing outdated content.

Why should you care about web sustainability? Well, because your users care. Sustainability is a main concern for 50% of users, and 85% have shifted their behaviour to a more sustainable consumption.

A sustainable SEO strategy also:

Improves page speed
Reduces crawl budget wasting
Improves indexability
Helps target content intent

Transcript

1. Sustainable strategy: developing an SEO strategy with the environment in mind
2. How much energy is spent on your website?
3. Every year, approximately 416.2TWh of electricity goes to making the internet run And the combined carbon footprint of energy, infrastructure, and communication technologies totals about 3.7%
4. ChatGPT may have consumed as much electricity as 175,000 people in January 2023.
5. Be smart & mindful
6. Where is the energy consumed on the internet
7. These have an impact on the Internet Co2 Footprint Source: Izzie Smith talk on E Commerce & Environment Data transfer End devices Data Centers Search Engines Heavy images Irrelevant content Unnecessary pages Poor navigation Heavy data transfer 3rd party plugins Crawling & rendering Latent URLs Index bload Unnecessary schemas Constant crawling Constant Indexing Algorithms Data Centers
8. Why should you care?
9. Obviously, that is better for the planet where we live in Sustainable pages are better for UX and for Google to crawl & index Sustainability is becoming one of main concern for users
10. What can we do to improve it?
11. Technical
12. Green Energy Hosting
13. ◦ Minimize visuals ◦ Avoid heavy elements ◦ Compress files ◦ Use lazy load ◦ Reduce HTTP requests Web performance
14. CDN & Web Cache
15. On site
16. Classic SEO Hacks Find you in the web Easily find in the nav Explore your product Explore your content Come back to product Purchase Return Site structure Keywords Internal links Clusters Breadcrumbs UX
17. Overall Strategy
18. Use data to organise your site ◦ Review your site structure ◦ Review your pages ◦ Review your Sitemap ◦ Remove outdated content ◦ Strategise content creation ◦ Reduce clicks
19. Sustainable website is good for SEO - It improves Page Speed - It reduces Crawl budget wasting - It improves indexability - It helps target content intent - It helps your users - It helps the Earth
20. What’s my website Carboon Footprint?