A dull dealership website is a major drag for an auto dealer. When a site doesn’t meet shopper expectations they won’t even show interest to spend more than 2 mins that eventually makes the loss to the business. Here are the best tips to improve the poor performing websites or optimize your normal dealership website.

1. Consistent Navigation

Website navigation is not an easy, exciting task. Most of the developers won’t even consider it as a serious job. When it comes to improving your site functionality, ensuring consistent navigation is one of the best steps you can take. That might sound a little hazy though. Consistency itself is a pretty large term — it can stretch to fit pretty much your entire dealership experiences. But when it comes to consistency and navigation, there are two essential elements:

  • Always make it incredibly easy to find what shoppers are looking for.
  • Conform to (or better yet, exceed) shopper expectations and industry standards.

2. Put Your Personality Forward

For many car dealers, personality is something that happens in person. It comes across in your friendly salespeople, your dedicated service technicians, your hardworking admin staff, and naturally. Often, that dealership personality is what wins over a wavering shopper, right? That’s all true, but the car shopper journey starts online — and so that’s where dealership personality most needs to shine.

3. Enable a Smooth Start to the Sale

The online car shopping experience is shifting online — and with good reason. The average dealership sales process is a lengthy affair involving a good amount of paperwork. This optimization focuses on what you can do for shoppers who have found a solution they want to explore more fully. So what can you do for your dealership website to facilitate a smoother, modern, more effective start to the sales process?

First up, offer payment calculators. These are very much helpful little tools that make it easy for buyers that want to explore their financial options. Next, move more of your sales process online. It’s not uncommon for a car buyer to handle almost everything over the phone, but it’s hardly the industry standard. Change that. Give buyers the option to fill out paperwork and complete slow and time-consuming tasks from the comfort and convenience of their own home. If you make that option available, consider what you can do to facilitate this with your website. Add snippets on your homepage that inform buyers of this service, feature the program in a banner image on your site, or showcase this initiative on its own web page.

You can also optimize your forms by cutting down on steps and form fields. Only requiring one step to schedule a service appointment or request more info about a vehicle means that buyers are less likely to bounce or experience a “Reconsideration” moment.

4. Bring the Visual Power

Humans are visual creatures — we take in and process enormous amounts of visual data every day. We rely on it. Research shows that people decide whether to buy a product within 90 seconds and on top of that, the visuals are the top influencer in purchasing decisions.

Now, people buy cars differently than other products. We don’t know anyone who has made a decision to buy a car 90 seconds after seeing a picture of it. However, that doesn’t make the visual less impactful. A buyer will likely still have that “Oh, awesome! I want it!” moment while looking at online images of the car.

Images and videos of the car will make your website more attractive and retain the customer for a long time. And also it brings different look for the vehicle detail page. Technically, any photos of the car will work, but we’re talking optimization, not just what will technically work.

5. Enlarge the Social Media-Website Relationship

You might have observed one thing about popular pages is they are actively engaged with people to listen about their likes and dislikes to understand what type of car they are looking for. An awesome website with little traffic doesn’t have a ton of opportunities to prove how good it is. Boost your traffic, CX, and overall engagement by paying careful attention to the interaction between your social media and your dealership website.

6. Offer a Uniquely Relevant Online Experience

Your website should function as an online extension of your dealership — representing your inventory, staff, and personality exactly how they are on the lot. But if someone walked into your dealership and asked about trucks, you wouldn’t take them over to your hottest sedans.

As ridiculous as that seems, when it comes to online car shopping, that’s the standard experience. Though sites like Amazon come up with brilliant personal product recommendations, relevant and unique experiences aren’t available on many dealership websites.

Optimizing your site for a more personalized experience starts with incorporating new website technology that can alter what buyers on your site see based on what they’re interested in.

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