According to new research from Dragon2000, while many garages may have realised that it is easier and more cost effective to have only one website that is mobile responsive, these websites often feature some very common mistakes in design and functionality.
Dragon2000 has analysed hundreds of garage websites and identified the major failings which are turning off consumers and impacting on Google rankings.
The main problem areas are: poor content that is penalised by Google; cheap template designs that do not stand out; social media icons on the homepage that have no links; very little or no contact information; and poor navigation, making it difficult for consumers to find what they are looking for.
“When redesigning a website, garages need to keep the potential customer in mind and ensure that the site is simple and easy to navigate. They should avoid unusual fonts and flash animations as they just irritate visitors, taking too long to load.”
According to Dragon2000, if a garage’s website is old- fashioned, hard to navigate or doesn’t scale well onto a mobile device, the customer may go elsewhere. Mark Kelland, Commercial Manager for Dragon2000, comments: “The bottom line is that garages are losing potential new customers as a result of a bad websites. All too often, consumers will leave a website if they can’t find what they are looking for quickly, if it is difficult to navigate, or if it is slow to use.
“When redesigning a website, garages need to keep the potential customer in mind and ensure that the site is simple and easy to navigate. They should avoid unusual fonts and flash animations as they just irritate visitors, taking too long to load.”
Dragon2000 has highlighted the key failings that garages should consider:
Social sharing – Social media icons on garages’ websites that are sharing links in disguise should be avoided. These tend to be on template type websites where a set of social icons such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are included, but they have not been linked to the garage’s own profiles. It would usually take more than a cursory visit to a garage’s website to make a consumer share a link to it on their own social profiles, before any relationship with the garage has been built.
Keyword stuffing – “Keyword stuffing” refers to the practice of loading a webpage with keywords to try to manipulate a site’s Google rankings. Often these keywords appear in a list or group, for example a list of car makes that could be serviced that might help ranking for those search terms (“Audi Servicing”, “BMW Servicing” etc.). Filling pages with keywords is seen as a negative user experience by Google, and can actually harm the site’s ranking.
Content – Google wants sites to focus on creating useful, information-rich content that uses keywords appropriately and in context – site content should be aimed at the user of the site and not search engines, and the rankings will improve as a result. However, try to play the system and it is likely to result in the site being penalised.
Poor Navigation – If your navigation bar is poorly arranged, too small to read, too big to fit one line, or anything else that isn’t easy or convenient, then it needs to be fixed. Consumers want a website that makes it easy for them to find what they are looking for.
Website enquiry handling – Garages must offer a range of contact mechanisms and ensure they are captured and actioned. All too often, enquiries are sent as email notifications that end up in a spam folder! The garage may never receive the enquiry, and the customer will feel ignored. Having booking requests automatically routed into the garage’s DMS means that bookings are never lost and they don’t have to be typed into the DMS manually, saving a lot of time.
