Did you know that a modern website design affects how you rank on Google? It does! That’s why it’s important to ensure that your site is kept up to date with a modern design.
It seems odd that your site design affects how it searches – after all, Google’s crawler doesn’t stop to look at a website and decide how visually pleasing it is, does it? In reality, design does affect your auto repair search results directly, but there are multiple ways that an old design will leave you buried on page 7. Here are three of them.
High Bounce Rate
Have you ever parked at a restaurant, taken a look inside – and then got back in your car? If it doesn’t look clean, or the place is falling apart inside, you might decide you’ll do better elsewhere. Websites are no different – if people land on a website and it looks very old, they don’t trust the information on it because it might be out of date. So, they leave immediately.
This is called bouncing from a website, and Google penalizes sites with a high bounce rate. That’s because Google’s job is to “suggest” sites to searchers by ranking them highly, and they don’t want to suggest a site that everybody runs away from as soon as they see it.
Non-Responsive Site
Most searches in 2018 are conducted on phones, so if you don’t have a responsive or mobile-friendly site, Google penalizes your search ranking. And because mobile-friendly designs weren’t around before mobile phones were so common, an old site isn’t going to be mobile friendly.
A site that isn’t mobile-friendly is a double whammy, because they are also nearly impossible to read on a small phone screen. This causes everyone to leave quickly, leading to a high bounce rate – and another penalty from Google.
Changes in Ranking Strategy
People have been trying to “game” Google’s ranking engine since it was first designed.
At first, search engines like Google rewarded sites that mentioned a search term the most – so people built sites that used the phrase over and over again, but offered little value.
Then Google rewarded sites that had the most incoming links. This worked well at first, but then people started buying links, paying a middleman so links to their site would be added to thousands of places online.
Every time someone finds a way for a low-quality site to search well, Google changes the way it ranks sites to prevent it. This cat-and-mouse game means that sites which were designed to search very well years ago won’t do well in today’s market. A modern website is designed to meet the most recent criteria Google uses to determine which sites should rank well, and which ones should rank poorly.
To learn about how Repair Shop Websites keeps customers’ sites up-to-date at no added cost, call us at 866-665-1605 or email us at Team_RSW@RepairShopWebsites.com.