When you look at your analytics, no matter what tool you are using to evaluate your traffic and track the progress of your automotive SEO, you’ll see a metric called “Bounce Rate.”
What exactly is your bounce rate?
Essentially, it is a ratio of how many people leave your website without actually interacting with it.
Most of the time, it measures how many visitors click on an outside link, look at that page, and then click away to another website without looking at any other pages or interacting with anything on that homepage.
Is having a high bounce rate bad?
It can be very bad for automotive SEO. It means that essentially, someone comes to your page, they take a quick look at it, do not like what they see, and do not bother to stick around to see if your dealership’s website has anything valuable to offer them.
This tells search engines that your website is probably not actually relevant to the searchers it’s been showing your link to, which means you might start to see your ranking tank, even if your website is actually extremely relevant to those searchers.
Sometimes your website is just not welcoming to visitors and they navigate away before giving it a fair chance.
Here are a few ways to lower your bounce rate and improve your automotive SEO:
1. Make your content more readable.
If your content is difficult to read, people are not even going to bother to try.
In today’s fast-paced, internet-centric world, people do not want to read huge chunks of text, in a long stream.
The human brain is trained to expect smaller, easy to digest snippets of information, rather than long chunks of text on a screen.
The average consumer is going to want to be able to skim the content to get the information they need,
rather than having to read huge chunks very closely to find what they are looking for.
Great content with terrible formatting can significantly raise your bounce rate.
Great content with great formatting can lower it.
2. Get rid of popups.
If you have any kind of popup on your website, even if it is just asking for the visitor’s zip code so you can give them a listing of the vehicles you have in their area, your potential customers are probably not going to like those popups.
They are annoying.
Forcing your page visitor to close even just one popup before they can look at the content they came to your website to read is going to drive many of them away.
You don’t want to put any roadblocks in between your visitors and the content they are on your website to consume.
3. Improve your calls to action.
You are going to want to have great calls to action on your website.
What defines a great call to action?
You want it to be very clear, in the form of a button, that can be seen within three seconds of navigating to your website.
What do you want your site visitors to do when they reach your dealership’s website?
Do you want them to browse your vehicles?
Call your dealership?
Come down to your dealership?
Whatever you want them to do, it should be clear and obvious, within seconds of a visitor arriving on your website.
4. Change up your content.
This doesn’t mean that you have to overhaul your website every single month or even every six months.
It does mean, however, that you should make sure that your content is always properly updated to reflect your business right now.
As soon as a vehicle has been purchased, remove it from your website (if you include a listing of your vehicles on your website).
Set a content schedule for your blog and make sure to constantly update it.
Put a list of your latest blog posts at the bottom of your website, so as your visitors are reviewing your website, they will be directed to the useful information you have posted on your blog.
5. Make sure you are actually targeting the right audience.
You might have a high bounce rate on your website because you are targeting the wrong audience.
For most dealerships, this error usually takes the form of targeting the wrong geographic regions or not targeting a geographic region at all.
You might find your dealership showing up in the search results for other areas.
Some people may click on your website only to discover that you are in the next town or state over, and will then click away.
Make sure that you are using keywords that actually reach out to the people you want to reach out to.
6. Use landing pages.
If you find that you are getting a high amount of traffic for a single keyword, you might want to consider building a landing page specifically for that keyword.
On this landing page, you will be able to provide the searcher with content that is more relevant to their search.
If that content is good enough and convincing enough, they will then click through to your website.
7. Make your page load faster.
There are a wide variety of ways to do this, including tools and widgets that you can install on your website that ensure that it loads as quickly as possible.
Why bother with this?
Because your potential customer and just about every consumer in the world expects your website to load in less than two seconds.
If your website takes more than two seconds, some will stick around, but most will click away.
