If your dealership website is receiving plenty of visitors but few conversions, then apparently there’s a problem. All the traffic in the world is worth little if your visitors take one look at your site and then back away, never to be seen again. Here are nine issues to pay careful attention to if you want to turn your hard-earned traffic into profitable business.
1) Need for Speed
Slow loading sites are remarkably effective at driving visitors away. Studies have shown that users start to lose patience after as little as one second’s delay, and that every additional tenth of a second reduces a page’s engagement rates by 10%. To counter this, remove all unnecessary features from your pages, optimize your images, and place any resource-hungry scripts at the bottom of your source code to ensure they don’t slow down page rendering.
2) Landing Page Targeting
If you’re driving traffic via advertising, you need to make sure your ad copy and the landing pages match up correctly. If a visitor arrives at a generic page rather than one which delivers on the ad’s promises, they’ll quickly hit the back button rather than looking any further.
3) Organic Relevance
Similarly, are search engines delivering relevant organic traffic to your pages, or does the targeting seem a little off-base? Could you tweak your content to give it a tighter focus, helping search engines to deliver more closely matched traffic? Alternatively, if your content is attracting unexpected visitors, can you capitalize on this traffic by expanding your content or product range to suit their expectations?
4) Mobile Compatibility
The days of desktop PC dominance are far in the past, and any modern website needs to function across a wide range of devices. If you present tablet or smartphone users with an unholy mess of tiny text, hidden navigation, and sideways scrolling, they’ll disappear with a single swipe.
5) Intrusive Advertising
From pop-ups to welcome mats, each aggressive ad technique you employ places another obstacle in the path of a user.
6) Confusing Clutter
A visitor to your page should be able to see at a glance that they’ve found what they’re seeking. If a cluttered layout gets in the way of this, or your navigation causes confusion, then visitors will be lost. A good website should grab the visitor and lead them deeper, not overwhelm them with detail.
7) Poor Text Formatting
Also, pay attention to the format of your text content. Provide a descriptive headline and a skimmable summary to convince a reader it’s worth continuing, and use plenty of white space to avoid the “wall-of-text” effect.
8) Unprofessional Design
Lastly, your pages should look reasonably attractive. They needn’t be candidates for a design award, but first impressions count, and your design should reflect your niche. A clean, professional appearance is especially important in “serious” topics such as finance. Animated graphics, clashing or garish colors, and jocular font faces all belong firmly back in 2003. Generating traffic is difficult and expensive, whether you’re using pay-per-click advertising or advanced SEO techniques. However, making the most of that traffic is what can make or break a business – and if your website turns visitors away after a single glance, your chances of success could be doomed from the start.
