How To Optimize Your Dealership Website

More traffic is not necessarily better if it doesn’t result in more sales for your car dealership. 

Here are six tips to help you gather more leads and turn visitors into real car buyers.

Navigate Consistently

Navigation on a website isn't the most exciting. We may not be able to make website navigation into the online equivalent of skydiving , but we will certainly start by dispersing the notion that it doesn't matter because navigation isn't exciting.

Here Are The Most Relevant Factors When Designing A Website

Navigation may not be the most glamorous feature of the website design for the dealership, but it is the most important aspect. Better yet, navigation on your dealership website can be optimized to deliver a better experience and performance across the website. Here's how one of the best steps you can take when it comes to improving your site functionality is to ensure consistent navigation. Consistency itself is a pretty big term, it can stretch to fit almost all of your dealer experience. But there are two essential elements in terms of consistency and navigation:

#1: Always make what shoppers are shopping for more convenient.

#2: Comply with shopper expectations and industry standards (or better yet, exceed them).

Making it easy for shoppers to find what they are searching for, clear navigation links on each page, intuitive layout that responds to shopper needs, and numerous navigation choices.

Navigation For Various Types Of People

Various options? Certainly! Navigation has to work for all of your customers, including people who already know what they're looking for, people who search individually, and people who need help finding what they want. Those who already know what they want are going to jump for items like a search bar, while those who are just searching may go to select options or filters. Your website navigation should be tailored to the needs of anyone appearing on your site. The second of these tenants requiring conformity (within reason) to shopper expectations is somewhat easier. This involves ensuring that your navigation elements fall within expectation parameters meaning they match as closely as possible with what shoppers expect and want.

Do not presume that your shoppers have the same experience because you know how to use your page. Explore other sites,  audit your direct competition as well as any common or innovative e-commerce sites. First, use the information you collected to find problem areas in your audit. 

Navigation is key to seeing success when it comes to creating an excellent online dealership experience, but so are many other things. Let's also optimize these. ⠀

Putting Your Personality Forward

Personality is something that happens genuinely for many car dealers. It can be seen in your typical salesmen, your dedicated service technicians, your hard-working admin staff and, of course, your unshakable GM. The personality of the dealership is often what wins over a wavering shopper, right? That's real, but the car shopper journey begins online — and that's where the personality of the dealership needs to shine most. 

So, decide the specific characteristics of your dealership personality and important topics of your mission statement to start optimizing for yourself. Once you have chosen these essential features, determine how well you can represent these features, and what elements and areas of your website can easily be updated to show these features. Find your homepage, branding, logo, copy, and website content unique to your dealership or take inspiration from dealers like Galpin and Rochester Toyota.

Have A Smooth Start To The Sale

The concept of digital car shopping is moving online — and with good reason. The average sales cycle for dealerships is a long affair that requires no small amount of paperwork— not to mention waiting.

This optimization focuses on what you can do for shoppers who have found a more comprehensive solution to explore. So what can you do to allow a smoother, more modern, more productive start to the sales process on your dealership website?

Then move more of your sales process online. The handling of almost everything over the phone is not uncommon for a car shopper, but it is hardly the industry standard. Change that. Offer shoppers the choice from the comfort and convenience of their own home to complete paperwork and boring and time-consuming tasks. Consider what you can do to promote this with your website if you make this option available. Add snippets to your homepage to remind shoppers about this service, show the system on your website in a banner photo, or view this initiative on your own website.

By cutting down on steps and forming fields, you can also optimize your forms. Requiring only one move to schedule a service appointment or requesting more information about a vehicle means shoppers are less likely to bounce or experience a moment of "reconsideration".

Allow shoppers to save vehicles they are interested in without having to sign in to your page as a final optimization tip. As we know from our forms when they absolutely have to give up information, people do not like to give up, and forcing them to do so may deter them from using that service or choice. 

Incorporate Visual Power

Human beings are visual creatures— we take huge quantities of visual data and process them every day. We rely heavily on it. Research shows that people determine whether to buy a product within 90 seconds and besides that, the visuals are the main influencer in buying decisions.

Consumers are now looking for (and buying) cars differently from other items. After seeing a photo of it, we don't know anyone who has made a decision to buy a car for 90 seconds. That does not make the visual less impactful, though. Perhaps a shopper still has that "Wow, great! I want to have it!" moment. When you look at your car's online pictures (you just have to wait more than 90 seconds to see your wallet).

Images and videos will make your Vehicle Description Pages come to life we can't stress this enough, not just pictures and videos. Technically, any pictures of the car are going to work, but we are talking about design, not just what is going to work technically.

Strengthening Social Media to Website Relationship 

A brilliant website with little traffic has no chance to prove how successful it is. Improve your traffic, CX, and overall commitment by paying close attention to the interaction between your social media and the website of your dealership.

Today, both ways work in social media. Through sharing this enhanced experience on social media, you can capitalize on your newly revamped dealership website. Link to your website regularly and show the quality you have to sell to social shoppers. Link to fresh and warm inventories of cars, or amazing specials. The tool can also be used to disseminate information about exciting new updates to your websites, such as fresh testimonial clips or new blog posts.

Offer A Unique Online Experience

Your website should function as your dealership's online extension representing your inventory, staff, and personality exactly how they are on the lot (if not slightly better). But if someone walked into your dealer's business and asked about trucks, you wouldn't take them to your hottest sedans.

Optimizing the website for a more personalized experience begins by incorporating new website technologies that can modify what your website shoppers see based on what they are interested in.

We deliver built-in Behavior-Based-Targeting website technology that adjusts content based on the desires of the user. This website tech learns from shopper activity on your site (including which landing page they arrive at) and adapts special content to represent offers that might attract them on your SRPs and homepage.