Less is much more!  This applies to most everything.  It especially applies to customer communications.  When you overload the message with words, graphics, slogans and calls to action, your effort to increase response does exactly the opposite.  Whether print, electronic or internet, the same holds true.  Voltaire said, “The best way to be boring is to leave nothing out.”   Keep It Simple! 

When shopping for their next vehicle, your customers visit your website to learn two things.  Do you have what I want and how much does it cost?  Everything you do to keep them from learning that diminishes the effectiveness of your website.  You are constantly approached by vendors with the next greatest thing that must be added to your website.   All claiming increased lead productions or increased quality of lead.  Some of these claims may be true, but you have to sit back and think hard.  They all want prime real estate on your home page and every other page in your site.  Of course they do.  If it does not get noticed, it won’t get used, it won’t generate leads and they’re out the door.  Is your website looking more and more like Times Square on New Year’s Eve or a Las Vegas Casino?  It’s too much to take in.  For the person looking for entertainment it’s perfect.  However, the dealership website visitor is seeking information not entertainment.  Too many distractions, blind alleys, unwanted content and too much misdirection end up losing potential customers. 

Get your website visitors to where they want to go in the fewest number of clicks as possible.  They want to know if you have what they want, so get them to their vehicle of interest in one or two clicks.  Don’t make them jump through hoops to get to this information.  Make sure your navigation is simple to understand and eases their hunt for information.  Next, they want to find out how much it is going to cost.  Answer their question.  If you don’t someone else will.  Give them a way to learn with reasonable certainty the price that they can purchase the vehicle for.  The reality is, average conversion ratios of website visitor to contact are very very low.  The majority of the visitors to your site never let you know that they were there.  One, great idea is to give what they want in exchange for what you want.  They want pricing.  You want a way to contact them.  Make the trade!  Include programming that allows them to make an offer on your vehicle which then automatically sends back a response as to whether their offer is enough.   They get the pricing information that they want and you find out who they are, what they want and how much they are willing to spend.  You must concentrate your websites design and functionality to the purpose of supplying what your website visitors want, not what you want. 

“That’s been one of my mantras – focus and simplicity.  Simple can be harder than complex:  You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple.   But it’s worth it in the end, because once you get there, you can move mountains.”  Steve Jobs

So many times, we get caught up in the “expectations of me”.  We assume that our own behavior and thinking is the norm.  We know that there are exceptions to every rule, but we assume that the way we go about doing things is generally also how the rest of the world does it.  It’s called the false consensus effect.    Essentially, we tend to overrate the degree to which our own behaviors, thoughts, viewpoints, etc. are shared by 

other people.   For example, a person may know that a Filet Mignon is the best cut of beef and simply assume that everyone agrees.  However, there are plenty who would argue otherwise.  This type of critical misconception is a major road block when measuring SEO results.

Looking at the one foot level, you conduct a few search queries using search phrases that you know that everybody else uses.  Your frustration grows as you continue to search and never see your listings where they should be - the first position.  This disappointment is understandable, but focusing on a few select queries is like standing in a forest and only seeing one or two trees.   You have to back away to get the big picture.  If you put ten random people in a room and instruct them to search for your product or service, you will most likely find that they used ten different search phrases.  Yes, you can optimize your website to perform at the highest level on key words that you feel are critical, but you very likely will be missing a huge opportunity and the potential for more visitors.

Contrary to traditional media where the rifle approach is preferable, in organic search the shotgun approach is favored.  The more search phrases that your website gets results for, the better.  Just because the search phrases that you are using don’t produce the results that you expect, does not mean that your next customer is not finding your website using different search phrases. 

The metric that needs your attention is not a word-by*word or phrase-by-phrase search.  You need to determine whether your organic visitor counts are growing?  Are these visitors converting at the expected rate?  And ultimately, are you converting them to sales?  Now, you’re looking at the health of the forest rather than just a few trees.

Bottom line, if your website is built keeping the visitor in mind first by offering valued content, ease of use and true relevance you will get the solid organic search performance you want.  Attempting black hat tricks and gimmicks will never work in the long term.   Keep in mind, the search engine’s customer is your customer.   If you take care of their customer, they will take care of you!