If your website takes longer than 3 seconds to load, your bounce rate is increasing by up to 150% per second!

We've heard many dealers voice their frustrations about being tied to an OEM-mandated website program. The good news is, there IS a solution, and we've witnessed dealer clients succeed in spades with it. Check out the video below to learn more.

When it comes to online reviews, the bottom line is that they affect your bottom line in a huge way. What follows is a brief but eye-opening discussion on how they can make or break your dealership, along with the top three factors for an effective online review management strategy. 

Trust-building and Brand Differentiation.

We live in an age where widespread internet access means that we, as dealers, don’t get to make the first impression when a customer walks onto our lot. With a vast majority of consumers conducting a vast majority of their research online before ever setting foot inside a dealership, we must be able to establish and build trust at the very outset of a prospective customer’s online journey. To this end, online reviews are critical to the initial establishment of trust for online shoppers. Research has shown that:

These numbers speak volumes about the necessity of online reviews for today’s shopper, and why including them in your reputation management strategy is no longer merely an option. Reviews are now more important than ever, and will continue to be critical for the foreseeable future.

Reviews are also necessary for brand differentiation. Consider that the automotive industry is an almost perfectly competitive market: a consumer can find the same or essentially the same products and features at any dealership within a given segment. As a result, we must find other ways to differentiate ourselves from our competitors. One way many dealers are doing this is by creating a unique and pleasant car-shopping experience. But even if you’ve formulated a slam-dunk customer experience, how will online shoppers know about it? You guessed it: by reading reviews on the internet. Given that 90% of consumers read online reviews before deciding to visit a local business, your reviews are what will make you stand out so that buyers want to visit your store rather than the one down the street.
 

Making Reviews Work for You.

Like social media, online reviews are not a one-and-done thing; making them work to your advantage requires incorporating them into your larger reputation management strategy and growing and monitoring them on a regular basis. Three of the most important factors for effectively managing your online reviews are recency, quantity, and quality.

When an internet user enters a search query into Google, Google’s aim is to serve up content or businesses that are most relevant to the search terms. It follows, then, that recency increases relevance, and dealerships with the most recent content and reviews will fare better on search results pages.

Along with being a key search ranking factor, the recency of your online reviews has a direct impact on whether consumers decide to visit your website and, ultimately, your dealership. BrightLocal’s 2017 Local Consumer Review Survey revealed several key findings that go to the importance of recency:

To sum this up, you must be constantly seeking new reviews – every day, from every customer. Getting ten great reviews in two days in order to cover up one bad review is not a viable business practice; today’s customers are more savvy than ever, and they will quickly catch on, resulting in a degradation of your dealership’s credibility and perceived trustworthiness.

Constantly seeking new reviews isn’t important only for recency, either; it goes to quantity, too. Consumers look to see how many reviews have contributed to your dealership’s overall star-rating. Think about it from a consumer’s perspective: Are you more likely to trust a business with five stars and only 2 reviews, or one with 4.5 stars and 50 reviews? Common sense points to the latter.

The star-ratings and content of reviews is, as you can imagine, hugely important, both for SEO ranking as well as for building consumer trust. On its support site, Google has said that “Google review count and score are factored into local search ranking: more reviews and positive ratings will probably improve a business’s local ranking.” Rating and content quality are important to prospective customers, too. According to Podium’s State of Online Reviews survey, 3.3 is the minimum star-rating a business must have for consumers to even consider engaging with it. And since 68% of consumers would pay more for the same product or service if assured they would have a better experience, it’s important that the reviews themselves include an evaluation of the various aspects of each customer’s experience that led them to write a positive review.

There’s an important caveat here, though. Having a few negative reviews isn’t always a bad thing; the key is how you respond to and manage them. In fact, a large number of online car shoppers say that they’d trust a dealership that professionally and caringly responded to a negative review more than they’d trust a dealership that had no negative reviews whatsoever. If you manage them properly, one or two negative reviews can actually enable trust rather than hindering it.

The bottom line is that online reviews have a huge impact on your bottom line. If properly managed, they can propel car shoppers both to your website and your brick-and-mortar dealership, and ultimately result in a significant lift in sales.

To learn how to make this process super easy, click here for a free demo!

I probably don’t need to tell you that lead forms are prevalent in today’s automotive digital retail space. Visit the website of almost any dealership in the country, and odds are you’ll be asked to complete and submit some variation of a lead form. Hell, your own dealership’s site more than likely has one. Yet lately, we’re hearing over and over again from dealership website providers and lead-gen companies that form submissions are dead: online shoppers just aren’t filling out lead forms anymore.

And to be honest, that claim is correct … sort of.  Last year, in partnership with PCG, we conducted a study of more than 400 dealerships nationwide, and sure enough, we found that online form submissions consistently converted at less than 1%. So, yes – it’s entirely likely that most website providers and lead-gen solutions are seeing almost no conversion from lead form submissions, which could reasonably lead to the conclusion that online shoppers aren’t filling out lead forms. But here’s the thing: it’s not the lead forms that are the problem. It’s that the websites in question aren’t properly optimized for conversion.

We know this because after we conducted the study with PCG, we came back and took stock of our own clients’ lead form conversion rates. The result: an average conversion rate of 5%. As it turns out, low lead form conversion rates are merely one symptom of two serious underlying conditions: poor website optimization and a flawed user experience.

Let’s take a look at why our dealerships have seen such a high rate of success as compared to others throughout the industry.
 

1. Mobile Optimization.  If you look at any of the major providers’ dealership websites, it becomes fairly obvious that most haven’t yet come to the conclusion that how they’re handling mobile is sabotaging their success. 60% of online car shoppers today are conducting their search using a mobile device. However, our study found that the average mobile bounce rate is a whopping 70%. To paint a better picture of what this actually means for a dealership, let’s do some quick math.

Say there are 10,000 people who come to your website while shopping for a car online. Approximately 6,000 of them are on a mobile device. 4,200 of those mobile users will view only one page on your site before leaving. In other words, you’re spending a huge chunk of your marketing budget to drive users to your site, only for most of them to leave almost immediately. A poor user experience for mobile shoppers is resulting in a colossal waste of your time and money. So, as you can see, proper mobile site optimization is no longer a luxury in the automotive marketplace – it’s an absolute necessity.  
 

2.  Site Speed.

Thanks to the constant advancement of technology, we as a society have become impatient; near-instant access to information has made us gluttons for instant gratification. Think back to the last time you clicked on an article or video in your Facebook feed. If it took more than a few moments to load, you probably clicked out of it without ever seeing the content you were looking for. Car shoppers are no different, especially when they’re on their mobile devices. In fact, if your mobile site takes more than three seconds to load, the chance of a customer abandoning it increases by 150% (yes, you read that right – 150%!). 

And if that’s not enough to convince you that site speed is important, this might be: In January, Google announced that site speed will soon become a factor in its search engine rankings algorithm. This “Speed Update” will go into effect in July of this year, and, according to Google, will impact sites that “deliver the slowest experience to users.” If a page’s loading speed scores lower than 90 out of 100, an automatic notification is sent to the Google team (you can check your page speed using Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool).

Thus, it’s critical to audit your website now and make sure your pages take three seconds or less to load: Come July, site speed will affect not only your organic bounce rate, but will also impact SEO performance.
 

3. Google Reviews.

At this point, most of us in the auto industry can practically recite from memory the statistics showing just how important online reviews are to today’s consumer. And now, as with site speed, Google reviews also play a role in SEO. The search engine behemoth last year announced it would be tying Google reviews in to overall organic search rankings.

But soliciting and actually obtaining customer reviews, whether for variable ops or fixed ops, is an ongoing challenge for most stores. Dealership service departments are notoriously overloaded, making it less likely that your service advisors will remember or take the time to ask every customer for a review. Likewise, between closing paperwork and sold vehicle delivery, asking for reviews can easily get lost in the process for your salespeople. But even in a perfect work, where every service advisor and every salesperson asks every customer for a review, customers often either forget or don’t want to have to figure out where and how to leave the review and then take the steps to do so.

Nevertheless, you need those reviews! The secret to getting them lies in making it easy and convenient for your customers. And you can do this through your website, by automating the process. Employing effective timing and carefully-worded calls-to-action will allow you to acquire a wealth of (positive!) customer reviews, thereby growing your dealership’s local reputation while simultaneously improving SEO performance.

To sum things up, the problem is not that today’s consumers aren’t filling out lead forms. Instead, low lead-form conversion rates stem from two larger, underlying problems: poor site optimization and a flawed user experience. The solution to these underlying issues involves three key components: mobile optimization and user experience, site speed, and Google reviews. Each of these factors alone can have a dramatic impact on the effectiveness of your digital marketing and retail efforts. But we have found that combining all three creates a massively successful trifecta that can put your dealership lightyears ahead of the competition.