First: I love the idea behind IPFS and decentralized storage and I'm sure there will be some valid use cases.
But: There's already tech available enabling these very use cases (see https://webtorrent.io/) and the adoption is pretty low. Plus IPFS doesn't solve the problem of disappearing peers at all. If no one's willing to mirror your awesome IPFS page, it will be gone the same way as with centralized hosting.
The company I work for has a similar tool (no fancy API yet, though) which shows the latency from some AWS regions to "the world" via different transit providers.
Well, first of all, talk to the team. To every single person involved. Be it the CTO or the intern. Have someone who has been on the team for some time onboard you and find out what the current obstacles are.
Then just grab one task and start working. You'll find the place you're needed most automatically.
Get a free account on both, set up YOAST (https://de.wordpress.org/plugins/wordpress-seo/) on your WordPress* and see if the generated sitemap.xml (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sitemaps) is working and contains all of your pages. Then submit it via Google Search Console and wait patiently.
The Search Console will then spam you (ehem, send useful information) with all sorts of things to make your site better.
As we all know, Google loves structured data, so adding some markup from http://schema.org/ won't hurt either. Again, the Search Console will give you hints on how to do that.
All that will help you rank better (not really faster) on Google, but in the end, the answer really is: Have Content, Content, Content ... and Social Media ;-)
* If you're not using WordPress, there are other ways to generate a sitemap.xml for your site. If you're brave, you can even write it by hand.