The Page Speed Lie: What Google's Score Doesn't Tell Plumbers

Everyone tells you to obsess over your Google PageSpeed score — but a fast website doesn't guarantee a single new customer. In this episode, Tyler breaks down why page speed is one of the most overrated metrics in home service marketing, what it actually does (and doesn't) impact, and the real signals plumbing business owners should be tracking instead — conversion rate, cost per lead, and booked revenue. If you've ever stared at a 95/100 speed score and wondered why the phone still isn't ringing, this one's for you.

🔧 In this episode:

• Why "vanity metrics" feel productive but don't move revenue
• What page speed actually affects (and where the myth comes from)
• The metrics that actually predict growth for plumbing companies
• How to know if your marketing is working — beyond the dashboard

Mammoth Marketing helps plumbing and home service companies build marketing systems that drive booked jobs, not just better scores. Learn more at mammothforplumbers.com.

Find more marketing resources for plumbing companies of all sizes at Mammoth Marketing. 
https://mammothforplumbers.com/

Find Tyler Williams on Youtube:
https://www.youtube.com/@tylervideos

Tyler Williams is the Owner of Mammoth Marketing an agency dedicated to helping plumbers (Clients or not!) grow their business through new customer connections.

Transcript

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I have a performance score of 33. You want to know how fast my page loads? Boom. Beware the marketer that comes to you with the vanity trap of your website page speed. Today we're going to talk to you about what really matters with your page speed and whether or not you are going to run into problems. All right, for those of you who don't know, my name is Tyler Williams. I run a marketing agency that serves plumbers, Mammoth for Plumbers. You can go to MammothForplumbers.com and we'd be happy to do a consult with you. But if you're a plumber, if you're a drywall guy, it's going to cost you a million bucks. Sorry. But today we're going to talk about page speed. Page speed is one of the boogeyman of SEO. And honestly, it's being used as a sales tactic and has been for a long time from marketing agencies coming at you saying, like, hey, your page speed sucks. And so your entire business is probably going to explode at any moment and you better hurry up and fix your page speed. Except that's not the whole story. So I really want to go through and give you a good idea of when page speed matters and when it doesn't. So first of all, let's talk about your page. This is your website. All right. And so on your website, you're going to have pictures, you're going to have videos, you're going to have information that is going to load. And you're going to want your user to be able to get these things. And the reason why is because they all should be serving to convince that user that you're awesome and that you're going to be the real like bee's knees when it comes to plumbing services, right? So and if you don't have those things, well, you might not look like the bee's knees, right? But the more things you add into a page and the longer it gets, it tends to slow it down because you have to load data. It's just a natural occurrence. Now, here's the thing that is happening is somebody will go into your page, they'll load it up into PageSpeed Insights or GT metrics, and they'll get a report. Now, these reports typically they make things look real bad, largely because they have to prove their own worth, right? Why have a page speed thing if it if they're all good, right? So keep that in mind. That's one angle. But often these things tend to like tell you, hey, this is good, this is good, but this is really bad. And then you might freak out because you're being told that this is extremely important to your visibility online. So that's not the whole picture because there's a whole other side of it. You gotta remember that no matter what, you're trying to serve this person, and what you're trying to do is get that person to convert. Now, if this person stays on your page long enough, Google's gonna see those signals. They don't care so much about what the score is, they care about what the user is doing because all of their business is about how do we give the user a good experience. And if you start like running after what I like to call vanity metrics, well, you're gonna forget about the user, and then your page is gonna diminish in quality on the user, and then you're gonna hurt your own SEO by running after a vanity metric called page speed. So you gotta be really careful because you can try and get these things to be green, you can try and get them to look amazing, but if that means you're removing a video or removing a widget with your reviews, like you could hurt this person's experience, which ultimately could even hurt your conversion rate. And that's the thing. You must, 100% must. We're gonna outline it in red here. You must pay attention to the experience that you're giving your user and whether or not they're actually turning into a lead. And now let's back up on top of this even more. The leads are what matters, but even your website is being indexed into AI systems, it's being indexed into ranking systems and info panels and things like that. And so you might not actually be getting leads out of your website. It's influencing them, but those are coming from other sources on Google itself. And so it really comes down to are you getting your leads? And one of the reasons why I don't like utilizing page speed as a big like performance indicator of how good your business is doing online is because what does your page speed look like in relation to other people in the market? One of the things that other marketers never do is pull up all those other competitors and say, look at their page speed, look at theirs, then look at yours, right? It's not something that they're doing. They're just saying, look at how bad yours is. Compared to what? Give us a good comparison measure. This is uh to me, it's all smoke and ears, and I don't like people who market that way or go to market that way. I like honesty and ethical. So anyway, now here's the biggest thing. This is where the fun really happens. I have a page speed score, right? I have one on my website. Currently, its performance is sitting at 33, except I know I'm also getting leads. So what I decided to do is I decided to why don't we just show you how long this thing loads? So I'm gonna pull up right here. And we're gonna do this the old-fashioned way. I'm just gonna go mammoth for plumbers.com. Oh, wait, my performance is 33. Oh, okay. Well, now for those of you who go, well, that must have been cached. Let's let's go and try a different browser then, shall we? I need to cut this part out, probably. Browser. All right. This is a fresh browser, this is a fresh tab. There's nothing funky about this. I have a performance score of 33. You want to know how fast my page loads? Boom. Do you really think that that is a problem for the user? No, it isn't. And that's why you have to be very, very careful about the marketer who comes to you talking about page speed. If you want to understand more about your marketing, well, do me a favor. We won't talk to you about page speed, but you can go to mammoth for plumbers.com, sign up for a consultation. We'd be happy to talk with you, look over your marketing, figure out what your goals are, and try and give you the next best steps. And hey, if we can offer you services, we will tell you if it makes sense. It doesn't always make sense. Not all of you are set up to be great clients right now. Some of you are too early, some of you too late. So, anyway, but if you want to see where we would land, go there. Free consultation. Unless you're a drywall guy, then it's a million dollars. So that's what I got for you today. You have a good one, and we'll talk to you next time. This video is sponsored by Mammoth Marketing, and it's my own marketing agency that I developed just for plumbers. At Mammoth, we help plumbers harness their marketing to build their company from nothing all the way to 8 million and beyond. We offer plumbers free consultations to go over their marketing and help them find the exact next steps that they need in order to grow their business. To schedule your free consultation, go to MammothForplumbers.com and we'll see you there.