Here's a newsflash. A quality website is the most important piece of your digital presence. ALL of your conversions are a factor in your website quality. It is your digital store. Making sure that your website works well, is easy to navigate, and includes all the relevant products and messaging for your business is the most basic starting point. You can pay a fortune for a fancy site but if the messaging is off, or your prospects get lost in all that fanciness, what’s the point?
Most car dealerships use large industry-focused templated sites, many of which also happen to include marketing on largely used vehicle listing platforms. That’s fine, and truth be told the easiest way to get an affordable site that works. There is one important point, however. Never confuse the cost of the site with the cost of the marketing that comes with it. Some companies may force you to combine the website hosting with the marketing, if not by contract, certainly by pricing strategy, but the key point to understand is that you need to measure the marketing and hosting separately.
A quality website really should not cost more than $500 per month. And that’s a lot. Whatever your bill is, anything over that is marketing. That’s how you should measure it. If you are paying for a service that includes marketing on a listing service, then you should easily be able to measure the leads you receive directly from that listing service, and then how they ultimately convert.
Your website needs to have three elements in order to do what it needs to. First, it needs to reflect your brand. What do you look like? What do you stand for? Core value statements. Next, it needs to accurately reflect what you sell or service, and how you do it. We sell this. These are our services. Finally, it needs to be simple and easy to navigate and convert. Every prospect landing on your site, anywhere, should be able to convert in two clicks. Navigation then contact form. They can bounce around for hours, but when they want to book a service appointment they should see a button that leads to service on every page, then an obvious link to form submission and/or a number to call.
Here are a few other pointers that will make your site easy to navigate. If you have a few key elements to your business, like service appointments, finance pre-approval, new inventory, and used inventory, don’t just leave them buried up top in the navigation bar with every other page on your site. Make them prominent buttons highly visible on the homepage of your site, and on every other page as well. All points lead to your core points of conversion based on your primary selling propositions. Keep it simple. Yes, content is a key element of SEO, and some clients love blogs, and maybe look at the contact page, the reviews you post, and the kitchen sink, but believe it or not, when it comes to customers navigating your site, less is more. More often than not they are searching for something specific, and the harder you make it to find it, the more they give up and move on. Lastly, keep your website current. Whether it’s inventory or a sales event, it should always reflect what is relevant now. Never outdated.