Google also takes into consideration the quality of the HTML code on the page. A lot of factors play into this: Does the page have proper closing tags? They even look at the amount of code on the page before you get to the main content. (Too many photos or ads on top and you are down-ranked a little.)
A few months ago they started penalizing the rank of any site that is not designed to work well on mobile phones. It is a technique called “responsive design.” It means that the website adapts to different sizes of screens, from phones to large desktop monitors.
Right now they are only penalizing the ranking of non-responsive websites. They have announced, though, that in the future websites that are not responsive won’t even show up in Google searches from phones. If your site isn’t adaptive to a phone, a phone user won’t ever see your site.
There are websites that sell responsive templates for about $20. Find a design you think looks nice and go with it. Make sure it says something about being “responsive” and adapts to mobile phones.
Hope this helps!
In addition to Google dinging non-mobile friendly sites, they also are rumoured to be dinging sites with a low PageSpeed Insights rank.
For example, they expect a site to download and show a visible page within 3 seconds. Responsive websites tend to download tons of CSS and JavaScript so it can be tricky to juggle both requirements to get the coveted ‘green’ rating in PageSpeen Insights.
Thank you