You're probably right but my naive hope was that things like PageSpeed insights that measure things like accessibility and page speed would be a part of search rankings.
I went from an average page rank position of 4 for relevant keywords to nothing and now there's 0 growth for views of my site. I'd have been better off just not touching it at all. Sad.
Prior to making changes, I had consistent 30% MoM growth for 4 months in a row and all from Google results.