Mindy Weinstein, Founder & CEO at Market MindShift, was the first speaker at Kijiji Autos’ DealerTalk Montreal conference today, launching right into an issue that seems more complex than it really is: is your dealership website being penalized by Google?
Weinstein, who has been immersed in the world of Search Engine Optimization or SEO for years, said she often sees companies expressing pride in their websites when it comes to the “great photos” and colours because of the time and energy that was put into preparing it for customers.
“This is what you think your website looks like, because you’ve taken so much time to prepare it for your customers,” said Weinstein to attendees, pointing to an image of a nice vehicle on a large screen behind her. “But really, this is what Google sees,” she said, changing the slide to an image of a rusted cockpit with a broken window.
“Your website needs to be crawlable so search engines can reach it,” said Weinstein. “You have to understand how search engines work. They’re robots. If they don’t understand how your website works, they will leave.”
In other words, if users — consumers and your potential customers — cannot find your website, or they have trouble connecting with your website, they will likely go to your competitors.
For this reason, Weinstein said dealer websites need to focus on three main areas: page speed, duplicate content, and mobile friendliness.
Page Speed
If your landing page, or any page on your website is slow to load — if it takes 10 seconds to load, the users on your page will leave. If it takes a mere three seconds, you will have lost a third of your potential customers. And if a user is on your website and is trying to scroll down the page, it must load in less than one second, said Weinstein.
Her advice? She suggests using free tools such as GT Metrix or Google PageSpeed Insights to check your website speed and get reports. “What’s great about these types of tools is that they tell you what to fix. They will tell you, so there is no reason not to fix it,” said Weinstein.
Duplicate Content
Duplicating your content on other pages of your website is also poor practice. Search engines do not like it when you have pages on your website with the exact same content, and can penalize the website on search engines.
Dealers that are concerned about this issue can use a free tool called Siteliner, or they can copy and paste a sentence from their website and put it in Google to see where else it appears. This will provide them with an idea of where and how many times content has been duplicated.
Mobile Friendliness
Mobile friendliness is a big deal, according to Weinstein. “Google announced it years ago — that mobile friendliness would be a factor for them. What has changed now is that Google pays more attention to the mobile version of your pages than the desktop version.”
The problem with a page that is not mobile friendly? It can get demoted in Google’s page indexing. But dealers can verify how mobile-friendly their pages are by visiting https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/feature/testmysite/ or Google Search Console — which is also free.
“From a search perspective, you want to be better than your competition — and I mean your competition online,” said Weinstein.
DealerTalk continues today in Montreal and will be held in Toronto on October 21. To register visit: www.dealertalk.ca
