If you’ve noticed that you are getting a lot of traffic to your website, but very little of that traffic ever comes to visit your dealership’s showroom or that a lot of that traffic arrives, but quickly leaves your website, you might be confused and frustrated.
In order to figure out how to get more of those people to visit your dealership, you need to know what about your website might be turning them off.
Here are some of the biggest reasons that people abandon websites:
1. The navigation is difficult to understand.
Nothing will turn potential customers off faster than having a website that is difficult to get around.
When visiting your website, the most important information is your contact information and which cars you have on your showroom floor right now.
Navigation that buries this information deep in tabs is never a good idea.
Think about what your visitors are on your website to do and make sure that those actions are easy to find.
They should not have to spend more than a few seconds looking for the information they are looking for.
2. Your website is overrun with advertisements.
This will generally apply more to your blog than to your website itself, but if you have sold advertising space on your website or blog to any other company, even a company that your site visitors might be interested in, it is probably going to turn a lot of people off.
An advertisement should not be the first thing that someone sees when they visit your website.
It should not even be the third or fourth thing they see.
For the average local dealership, any ads at all is too many ads to have on your website.
3. Your content is not structured properly.
The first thing you need to do is to group all similar content together.
For example, if you are going to give each of your vehicles a listing on your website, all of those listings should be under the same tab or in the same area of your website.
Don’t spread them out across many different tabs, unless you carry different brands.
Your website should also have some introductory content, especially on the homepage.
A little bit about what you do, who you are, and where you are located will be essentially homepage material.
4. You have video or audio that automatically starts playing.
This may have been alright in 1999, but no one wants to click onto a website and have noise start playing out of their computer.
Make sure that all of your videos require a click in order to start playing (or to enable the audio), and do not put an automatic audio track on your website, even if you think the list of songs it is going to play is appropriate for your dealership.
This is not your 2004 Myspace page, it is your business.
5. You require people to provide you with their information before they can see your vehicles.
This is something that more and more dealerships are doing. In order to show their site visitors the list of vehicles they have on their lot, they require those visitors to provide the website with contact information.
This is going to drive a high percentage of potential leads away from your website.
They may have been willing to do business with you previously, but being required to give up personal information just to view the cars that you have for sale is often enough to send people off of your website and to your competitors who do not have this requirement.
6. The design of your website is boring.
Boring design is going to be one of the biggest killers of conversions.
A boring design tells your visitors that your dealership is not really concerned about its reputation and it does not care what they think of the dealership.
Just as you beautify the exterior and interior of your physical dealership and try to keep it as clean as possible, you should make your website as attractive as possible.
A modern, functional website is going to convey the message to you visitors that you are a modern, functional dealership that cares about making sure they get into the right vehicle for their needs
7. Your content is boring.
No one wants to read boring content.
No one wants to engage with a business that provides them with boring content.
Before posting any kind of content to your website, make sure that you are thinking about your potential readers.
Will they find it interesting?
Will they find it valuable?
Will they find it edifying?
If the answer to any of these questions is no, then your content is not what you should be posting to your website.
8. Your content is old.
People can spot old content just as easily as they can spot old design.
Plus, search engines are not exactly in love with old content.
They much prefer fresh, updated content.
If your content is more than a year or so old, it is time to think about whether or not that content is serving you and if it needs to be updated.
Chances are that it probably does need to be updated, even if you are still at the same location and using the same phone number.
Rewrite the content so that it continues to be engaging and useful, year after year.
