Repair your broken auto dealership website in 5 easy steps

Okay, be honest: how is your auto dealership website performing?  Are you getting plenty of traffic and leads or are you disappointed to report that your website is performing poorly?  If you’re experiencing the latter, don’t worry—a number of our automotive clients originally came to us with the same problem.  As experts in the field of auto dealership marketing, at Stratosphere Studio we’ve been able to turn our clients’ websites into effective arenas for customer-building.

To help you improve your auto dealership website’s performance, here are the 5 steps that we recommend:

1.       First, make an accurate diagnosis.  Just as every car repair starts with a detailed diagnosis, your website repair is no different.  First, take a step back (and a deep breath) and examine your website design.  How clear is the navigation?  Are your pages easy on the eyes?  Do you have a ton of text without many images?  How about keywords—do you have the right keywords and keyword phrases on each of your pages?  How high are you ranking on search engines?  Make a detailed list of exactly which areas need to be addressed.

2.       Time for some overhaulin’.   Now you need to do a thorough cleanup of your car dealership website, starting with the design.  Examine other websites to see what appeals to you and what doesn’t.  Go with a look that incorporates both images and designated areas for calls to action.  Add lots of keyword phrases and up-to-date content to every page.  Turn your website into something that you and your staff can be proud of.

3.       Drive more traffic.  Once your site is up to speed, it’s time to drive more people to it!  Most likely, you have already planted your top-performing keywords throughout the site, so your next step is to add more content to your site through blogging.  It can be time-consuming, but very well worth it.  Try to craft content frequently—at least on a weekly basis.  Focus on subjects that your customers are genuinely interested in and include the right calls to action to up your lead generation.

4.       Get to the track.  What I mean is that you should definitely begin tracking your website’s performance, if you’re not already.  Use Google Analytics or another website tracking service and monitor your progress on a daily basis.  Watch which of your blogs perform better than others and determine which keywords are most successful (if you’re wondering how to do this now that Google has reported it will encrypt keyword searches, click here). 

5.       Perform regular maintenance.  As you already know, a car will start looking pretty bad if it’s not taken care of regularly.  Your website needs your TLC, as well.  Frequently check to make sure all your links are working properly, that your content is up-to-date, and that your call to action requests are being fulfilled on time. 

With these steps, your website should be up and running beautifully in no time!

Need help with your auto dealership marketing?
At Stratosphere Studio, we specialize in digital marketing for the automotive industry and offer a variety of affordable services, including blogging, social networking, website design, search engine optimization, and more.  Tom, our company’s founder, once owned his own auto body shop before using his marketing expertise to help other shops.  We’ve even been featured in Fender Bender for our knowledge of automotive marketing.  If you need an agency to help your dealership, then be sure to contact us today.  We’d love to help!