feature
Is Your Dealer Website Hurting Your Bottom Line?
P
ull up your average dealer website and you typically find a bunch of stuff besides the core content and inventory: A slider with multiple promotions that load every few seconds. A range of calls to action (CTAs) across the home page, with many treated equally whether they are important or not. A boat load of third-party tools or scripts that are ac tivated when the page loads. Some are invisible (such as tracking pixels) while others are embedded into the page providing various functionality. Video which shows activity at the dealership, a car driving down the highway, you name it. Or pop-ups that can include anything from the latest promotion to content about COVID.
But you have to ask yourself: Is all of this stuff worth it, or does it hurt the overall performance of my website, and thus hurt my bottom line?
Why Do You Have a Website?
Let’s look at why you have a website. What is its core purpose and does your website serve that purpose? If you are a car dealer, then your primary objective is to sell vehicles. If you have a service bay, then your secondary purpose is to keep it full at all times. Finally, other sources of revenue, such as your body shop, parts department and F&I, will get included as part of your offering. Let’s be clear: Unless someone can convince us otherwise, the primary purpose of your website is to sell vehicles and keep your service bay full, if you have one. This should guide all of your decisions about your website and influence you to avoid things that will blunt that purpose.
What’s Important?
If we agree about the primary purpose of your dealer website, then we should now look at what’s important to ensuring that that purpose is fulfilled at every opportunity. Here are 5 things you should optimize for your website to optimally perform:
SPEED No joke. The slower your site is, the more
money you will waste. You want your mobile and desktop versions of your website to load quickly at all times. As May 2021
T e x a s
D e a l e r
Featured Speaker Adam Dennis SurgeMetrix
far back as 2012, Amazon was reporting that the slower the page load, the more money they would lose. A Fast Company article in March of that year discussed how Amazon calculated that a page load slowdown of just one second could cost it $1.6 billion in sales each year. That was over 8 years ago. The need for speed was important then, and even more so now, with the vast majority of people using their cell phones to shop online. Read on and you will see our findings for study that we recently did with some of our customers on the importance of having a fast website. The results are promising for those who recognize that fast websites make money.
SEO RATING As Google expands the available space it
uses for paid content, it is getting harder and harder for anyone to get on page one of a search. This makes it even more important to take care of your SEO fundamentals: Keep your content fresh and relevant. Make sure your site has all of the technical components Google wants to see. This requirement can get in the weeds, if you don’t have this expertise, you should seek professional advice. As I mentioned earlier, ensure that your site loads as quickly as possible. Make sure that you are optimizing your Google My Business (GMB) listing by updating your content and maintaining your Google reviews above a 4/5. (While this last item might seem disconnected because it is not actually your website, a well optimized GMB profile is critical for driving traffic to your site and calls to your dealership. Think of it as a form of modern SEO that is getting more important every day.)
GOOGLE PERFORMANCE Truthfully, if you focused
on how your website behaves from Google’s point of view, then you would be in a good position to ensure that your website is fast, and your SEO rating is solid. One of the simplest ways to monitor your site’s performance is to use Google’s Lighthouse app. If you have Chrome, you will need to add the Chrome extension (just look it up on the Chrome Web Store). Once the extension is loaded, visit your site and then tap on the extensions icon in the top right of your Chrome window and select Lighthouse. When you do this, Lighthouse will analyze your website and give you a report on the mobile and desktop speed of 35
