What’s the purpose of your dealership’s website?

There’s a good chance you can answer that easily. It’s supposed to drive car shoppers to your inventory to turn them into leads via phone calls or form submissions. The issue is that some dealers opt for bells and whistles instead of making their most important pages generate leads.

Whether it’s banners or chat boxes, there are things that seem effective but really obstruct a buyer’s ability to find and view inventory that matches their search intent. Based on our nationwide network of dealers, here’s a checklist for easy wins on some of your most important pages.

Car Dealership Homepage Easy Wins

So, let’s just list some of them out:

• Is a search widget installed?
• Is navigation clean and easy to use?
• Are buttons that produce inventory and purpose pages located above the fold?
• Are there too many pop-ups?
• Are your phone number and directions easy to find in the header?

To reiterate, because it’s one of the most important features, do you have an easy-to-use search widget that eliminates friction for consumers?

We know that the homepage is an important entryway to get car shoppers to where they’re hoping to go — and where you want them to be.

Now, we want to look at where most of your leads come from. According to our dealer network data, most leads occur on SRPs and VDPs:

• 61% of email leads
• 27% of phone calls

Car Dealership Product Search and Product Page Easy Wins

Ask yourself these important questions:

• How easy is it to click through to a product page?
• Do your search filters make sense?
• Are your search filters prioritized based on user behavior?

The more steps you include and the more you make consumers think about choices, the higher the bounce rate from your site. It’s critical that you don’t overdo form submissions: 2 or 3 is all that you need and want.

3 Questions to Ask Yourself

Consider the following:

• If you’re doing well with all of these strategies, how well are you merchandising and marketing each product?
• Are you comparing your inventory counts to your competition’s inventory counts?
• Are you shopping on your own site across all devices: mobile, tablet, and desktop?

If you’re not sure whether or not you’re doing well with these strategies, we have a few things you can do yourself:

• Homepage to SRP CTR Audit
• Check Your Audit Results with Our Network’s Benchmarks
• Use These 12 Conversion Strategies

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