When you make an important life decision, there’s a good chance you seek a second opinion. After all, when it comes to things like an elective surgery or a home renovation, you want to get it right. In the business world, though, we rarely ask for a second opinion. We rush to judgment and then grow complacent. Complacency can cost dealerships like yours a lot of business.
In our 10+ years of experience, the product of that complacency is most often found on dealership websites. And, when we perform an audit, we encounter three issues more than any others:
Many websites have inadequate “why buys” or lack them altogether. As a result, there is no unique selling proposition (USP) for those dealerships — at least not one easily gleaned from visiting their websites. We also find many websites with logos that are sized improperly and/or used too sparingly. In some cases, brand colors are used inconsistently, indicating brand standards are either not being followed or are not defined well enough to be followed. Any one of those problems presents issues for prospective customers.
This one is pretty straightforward and one you may have noticed when pulling up your site on your smartphone at home or while checking out your new sliders at work. The load times of the majority of sites we audit are slow. It not only leaves visitors frustrated, but search engines can ding your ranking based on your site’s speed. And then there’s also this little nugget from HubSpot: The first five seconds of page-load time have the highest impact on conversion rates.
If you thought slow speeds were negatively affecting your site’s rankings, wait until you see what duplicate content does. Most sites we audit let their websites or providers generate copy for title tags and descriptions, which often gets flagged by Google and other search engines as duplicate content. Not only does it not read as well as customized copy, but it really hurts a dealership’s ranking on Google, Bing and other search engines.
80% of the dealership websites we audit suffer from one or more of the above issues. How certain are you that your dealership is in the 20%? Maybe it’s time for a second opinion.
Let’s talk. You may even qualify for a FREE AUDIT!