Does Your Car Dealer Website Retain Visitors?

So, you launched a car dealer website, that’s great. However, have you thought of whether it delivers a satisfying user experience (UX)? Unfortunately, a website is not something you can set up once and forget about. To retain customers your website should provide them with a perfect user experience. In order to manage it, you have to improve your website performance continually.

To put it in perspective, consider the website as a child who you need to work with on a daily basis and invest your time and efforts to. As every child passes an IQ test from time to time, your website should pass the SEO website audit as well.

Aside from such a comprehensive check, you can conduct a brief examination of your website by yourself in accordance with the list below.

We’ve gathered 6 of the best practices to keep visitors on your website longer. Follow them and you will improve your website conversion and gain more leads.

1. Responsiveness

What? Don’t worry, we will explain it. Grab your phone, friend’s tablet and neighbor’s laptop to view your website. How does it feel? If you don’t face any difficulties and the way the website operates on different screen resolutions is the same – useful and pleasant, then congratulations, you have a responsive website design. If you have to zoom in on the pictures and words, and the website in general is difficult to view and interact with, then it likely was developed using the pre-mobile methods of building websites.

We can’t stress enough how important responsive website design is for user experience, especially now. It’s 2018, mobile device browsing share exceeds 60%. Visitors should be able to browse your inventory via their phones, otherwise they won’t stay long.

2. Navigation

It’s great to know where to find what you need. Your navigation bar should help visitors reach the pages they are looking for, so make it obvious and clear. Also, make sure you don’t have broken links, that lead to nowhere.

3. Search bar & search filters

Websites in general were intended to save people’s time and ease their shopping experience. One of the many ways to attain this is the ability to search through the websites using one or two key words. For the car dealer websites it can be make or model of the vehicle.

The easier it is for users to interact with your site, the more likely they will stay longer and come back.

Equally important for car dealer websites is to provide shoppers with advanced search filters. Aside from year, make and model, there are dozens of parameters by which visitor would want to filter his search results. Give your customers such an opportunity and they will bookmark your website.

4. Visual consistency

The rule of thumb for any website design is to make visitors think that they are on the same page while going through your website. It doesn’t mean your design has to be boring and flat. But visual consistency is a great way to increase website usability, and the more usable it is, the more traffic it attracts.

Let us look at an example. Everybody knows the hamburger menu icon. Selecting (tapping or clicking) this button results in a menu being revealed. Most Internet users will agree with that. Let’s assume that in order to be outstanding you decide to create a totally new icon with the same properties. Will your users appreciate it? Maybe they will, eventually, but at first they will be confused. What if you decide to change all the icons? It would hardly tip the scales in your favour.

So, follow the established rules and laws of visual consistency in order to avoid confusing your visitors.

5. Brevity

Did you know that only 28% of the text is ever read on a page? Did you know that a page which is overloaded with text scares visitors away?

You finished reading the preceding paragraph and now you think: okay, I’ll move my creativity from appearance to content. We have no objections, but don’t get carried away. Visitors are coming to the e-commerce websites or online marketplaces to achieve their goals, which are not to read tons of text. Be concise and to the point. We know it’s not easy, but be resourceful with your words.

6. Videos

We have intentionally saved the best for last. Video occupies the first place in terms of keeping people on the site longer. Imagine, if your video lasts 30 minutes, approximately 70% of visitors will watch from 5 to 10 minutes of it. If you think that’s not much of a progress, keep in mind that the average time on site is under 2 minutes for most websites in the USA.

Remember that such retention can be attained only if the above mentioned recommendations are met. The power of video drops significantly if visitors can’t watch it on mobile devices or send it to their friends.

Conclusion

To deliver a superior customer experience car dealers should consider many factors, but this is the way it goes. The competition in the automotive industry is fierce, but being a leader is well worth it. So, hold that thought and contact us today to turn your website into a place where visitors want to stay.