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3 ways dealerships are boosting website traffic by over 300% with Overfuel
Alex Griffis September 3, 2023
1. They’re acknowledging the speed problem
According to SOASTA Research, for every second it takes to load your website, conversions can fall by up to 20%.
Speed is both the most important and most often overlooked aspect of website performance. More often than not, dealerships are spending thousands per month on pay-per-click advertising, SEO vendors, and content creation only to undermine their own success.
A benchmark report by Wattspeed, released in April 2023, revealed that only 39% of automotive websites met Google’s recommended speed standards on mobile devices, where upwards of 80% of car buyers start the process. As an industry, automotive ranks second only to travel in terms of worst performers.
What this means is that most automotive websites, upwards of 61% of them, don’t meet the minimal standards to have their content properly indexed on search engines or properly quality-scored for advertising. This is the driver behind poor advertising performance, overpaying for advertising, and missed opportunities for local search engine rankings.
At Overfuel, we’ve accomplished both a 95+ performance rating (“A” grade) on GTMetrix and 90+ performance ratings on PageSpeed Insights. As a result, our customers often see 300-400% increases in search engine presence and organic search impressions:
This not only helps them outrank the competition, especially on the local level, but it reduces advertising costs by improving the quality scores of the pages on the website. As traffic increased pretty dramatically over 2 months, so did the lead volume to the tune of 268%.
2. They’re leveraging AI and ChatGPT to create compelling content
When it comes to search engines and generating traffic for your website, content is king. Automotive website vendors often delete inventory as it moves off the lot. Not only is this a bad practice, but deleting old inventory is detrimental to building out a robust sitemap. For every car you delete, often times Google will treat it as a lost page or an error in Google Search Console. As these errors compound over time, the overall quality of your website, from Google’s purview, is diminishing.
By integrating ChatGPT, Overfuel generates compelling content about each vehicle on your lot. Think of this as turning every vehicle listing into a blog post—except it writes itself, automatically, on your behalf. As vehicles come and go from your lot, you can still reap the benefits of engaging content that compounds over time. As you add content, you add more opportunities to be indexed on a search engine. And as the content catalog grows, you have potential to reach more customers.
3. They’re making decisions based on data, not hype
The formula for performing well on search engines is actually pretty simple, especially if you have real-time analytics that crunches the data, tells you where customers are coming from, and informs you on which marketing activities are generating the highest return on investment.
The reality is, most dealerships don’t. Their customers are shuffled around third-party plugins that complete for a customer’s attention rather working together to make a sale. When a customer drops off, dealerships often can’t see what happened or why they dropped off.
This is why Overfuel tracks every step a customer takes in the buying process, from start to finish. We connect the dots between credit applications, trade-in offers, and other customer touch points to track conversions. As a result, dealerships get insightful and transparent reporting to understand which vendors are performing the best.
Remember, the formula is simple when your website products are working together in your best interest. When you can properly attribute conversions, you know where to invest more dollars. When your website comes optimized for SEO out of the box, you don’t need to worry about hiring an agency. When you want to feature inventory to write a seasonal promotion, you don’t need to write code or hire a designer.
Take out the guesswork and get a free no-obligation audit
If you want a glimpse of where your website might be struggling, you can contact Overfuel for a no-obligation, free website audit.
