Equipment Rental Websites: Featuring Black Dog Equipment

When websites are 5 years old, it’s time to seriously start considering a website redesign. Think about it from a technology point of view. When your mobile phone is 5 years old, it’s glitchy and doesn’t perform at its optimal level as when you first bought it. There’s so many new upgrades and tools you can use with an updated phone. Now apply that comparison to your website. Google is always coming out with new rules, tools, and guidelines to keep them ahead of their competition search engines. In some cases, an older website is no longer relevant and doesn’t have the capability to perform with those newly released tools and guidelines, so they start to lose their first page ranking.

Website Redesigns should be a priority if you want to keep your business’s health and search engine ranking performing at its peak.

We recently did a website redesign for Black Dog Equipment, a staple small business in Montrose, Colorado. If you’re a local, then you are familiar with this company as well as the Keep family. If you don’t, well, you may be living under a rock!

Here’s how this project rolled out:

One of the first things we look at to see if a client even needs a website redesign, is to look at their current website’s health. A big part of this is analyzing it with PageSpeed Insights to get an idea of how users are experiencing the website on both desktop and mobile. As you can see from the screenshots below, Black Dog Equipment’s old website did not have a passing PageSpeed Score.

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) is important to look at because it marks the point in the page load timeline when the page’s main content has likely loaded. A fast LCP helps reassure the user that the page is useful. For a good user experience, Google recommends your LCP score is 2.5 seconds or less. Black Dog Equipment’s old website took nearly 7 seconds to load.

First Contentful Paint (FCP) is a user-centric metric for measuring perceived page load speed. FCP measures how users perceive the performance of a website, rather than what a speed test tool measures. A good FCP score to provide a good user experience is 1.8 seconds or less. Before the redesign, Black Dog Equipment’s website was scoring at 3.1 seconds.

Total Blocking Time (TBT) measures the total amount of time that a page is blocked from responding to user input, such as mouse clicks, screen taps, or keyboard presses. The sum is measured by adding the blocking potion of all long tasks between First Contentful Paint and Time to Interactive. Any task that executes for more than 50 ms is a long task. The amount of time after 50 ms is the blocking portion.

Speed Index measures how quickly content is visually displayed during page load. This means when a customer would go to their equipment rental site, the page wouldn’t load for nearly 31.4 seconds.

See the screenshots below to see Black Dog Equipment’s PageSpeed Insight Scores comparing before and after the redesign.

The before and after photos of a redesign are always fun to see. Use the slider below to see the before and after images of the homepage, rental page, FAQ page, and contact page. You will notice a huge upgrade in their header. One of the goals for their website was to make it easy to follow their social media websites, as well as leave them a Google Review. So we made that available throughout their website.

Many business owners don’t consider how crucial branding is for their business. We have dealt with many business owners who have ran into issues with their competitors who started copying them. They have a similar name, no logo, no brand colors, and no patterns. For Black Dog Equipment, though, they have established their logos, shields, colors, and even often use dogs in their marketing. So we took their logo colors and implemented it throughout their website. We used their shields as well.

We used modern circles for their pattern to match the shapes of their logo, as well as fun blue boxes to give it some edge. We wanted to give their new website some boldness without overbearing their services.

Black Dog Equipment is currently #1 or close on Google for search terms such as equipment rental in Montrose, CO as well as for their individual equipment for rent.

Search Engine Optimizations (SEO) is not just about search terms and phrases as most people think, though. Many believe that if you add search terms here and there, their website will rank well. They don’t take into consideration that if you are using a Wix site or free website builder and are uploading oversized images, your website will never rank better than your competition.