Azure Web App Latency

I have a simple Azure Web App setup using a single Standard Small Instance type in Central US region. The site itself is running a node.js website.

I noticed google crawl was reporting average latency around .5s. To monitor I added a 6 Azure monitoring endpoints some pointed at dynamic pages and others at static content served by IIS alone.

All metrics are reporting high latency from 250ms-1s+ depending on geographic region. I also tried setting an alert on "average response time" exceeding 1s on the new Azure portal and the alert gets triggered every couple of hours it seems.

Is this latency normal for an Azure web app? Is there anything I can configure/change to improve it?