What is better? Site Traffic or Site Conversion
In the mad rush to increase traffic to our websites, we often lose sight of the ultimate goal... converting traffic into leads. Our basic internet strategy should be two-fold: 1) Drive traffic to the site 2) Once the viewers arrive at the site, don’t let them leave... keep them on the site as long as possible to increase the likelihood of turning a casual visitor into a lead.
Driving Traffic To a Website
There are three essential elements for driving traffic to your dealership website: 1) the website must be fully optimized for target keywords 2) social media sites are up-to-date and 3) blog entries are interesting. These three facets work alone and together to attract your potential customers and draw them onto your website. Once viewers find their way to your site, the next step is converting those visitors into leads. If the website fails to leverage its traffic, then employing the best SEO techniques and writing the most engaging social media and blog content in the world won’t be worth a penny.
How 'Sticky' is Your Site?
What is a Sticky Site? A sticky site is a website that is rich in content, easy to navigate, and provides information with few key strokes, it makes a visitor wants to stay. Sites which are hard to navigate, visitors find hard to communicate with the dealership, and information is hard to access are not sticky sites. These sites drive viewers away.
Making your Dealership Website 'Stickier'
In addition to reviewing the number of unique visitors to your site in a given month, you must review the number of leads your dealership site generates. In other words, what is your conversion rate? If your rate is low, the first thing you must consider/assess is how long you are able to keep a viewer on your site. If they viewer stays a second or two and then leaves, that’s a good indication that your site isn’t sticky. That's when you know it's time to review your site with a critical eye and make the necessary changes to retain these viewers and turn them into leads. The longer a viewer stays on your site, the more likely your site will convert that viewer to a lead. Discuss with your website provider what you can do to increase the 'stickiness' of your site.
Converting Traffic to Leads
There a few basics items you need on your dealership website to increase the number of leads from your dealership website. On your website, you should:
- Prominently display your dealership’s phone number (having a toll free number that is exclusive to your website will help you track the leads which come from your website).
- If majority of viewers are leaving the site in less than 20 seconds, use a different home page with a different strategy or ‘look’.
- Offer ‘vehicle search’ on every page (making the vehicle search available from any page increases the chance that sooner or later the viewer will perform a search).
- Allow a one-click or no-click Contact form (the less the clicks, the easier it is for a customer to contact the dealership).
- Emphasize your strengths (if your dealership specializes in selling mini-vans, highlight this fact on the site. Make sure your testimonial section highlights this specialty too).
Work with your website provider, making simple changes such as those listed above should not cost you an arm and a leg, but a few percentage point increase in your number of leads will greatly improve your bottom line.
Feel free to email or call me with any questions. Best of luck to you in your traffic conversion efforts!
Syed Azam
AutoJini.com
syed@autojini.com
515-232-2024
