Our subject is Rountree Moore Toyota, one of my clients, and their website, which can be found at www.RountreeToyota.com. When I first started working with Rountree Moore Toyota, they had so many things wrong with their website that it would take an entire post just to get through it. Suffice it to say, we were starting at square one. (Click here if you’re impatient and just want to see the numbers)

Our effort went through several major steps, and what’s amazing about the results I’m going to share with you a bit later is they were achieved on a site that was still a work in progress.  But here’s are some examples of the things we did:

The first step was to follow a lot of the guidelines I set forth in this post: Search Engine Marketing 1-2-3. I changed and updated meta tags, page headings and page titles. I submitted the dealership’s information to two dozen different search engines and directories.

That was just the first step. Then we undertook a significant redesign of the site, looking closely at what the then-current user behavior was on the site. We wanted to streamline a customer’s shopping process, making the site easier to navigate and highlighting key actions that customers would want to make. Consequently, we found a web site template from their provider that had some of the features we wanted, and went about modifying it.

We added a “Request for Quote” button to the top line. We stripped out extra links in the drop-down menus. We custom-built a new inventory page and landing pages for each particular model. We added descriptive free text to every page a customer might land on. We added content boxes at the bottom of the primary landing pages – the home page, new inventory and used inventory – to make them easier for search engines to spot. We added HTML links to the bottoms of several pages, both for ease of navigation and for optimization purposes.

We added a YouTube page, links to Facebook and Twitter pages; we tied their customer testimonials page into their DealerRater.com page, allowing them to embrace and manage their online reputation (as per one of my previous posts: “Online Reputation Management – The Future of Word-of-Mouth“).

As I said, there were lots of steps, lots of little details we addressed (far more than those I’ve mentioned), and it took a fair amount of time and thought. But in the end, the site is easier to navigate. More people come to it. They get more leads than they ever did before. But, to quote Reading Rainbow, “you don’t have to take my word for it.”

Here are the results from Rountree Moore Toyota’s web site for the month of May, as compared to their four-month average from January through April:

Without a doubt, those seem to be pretty impressive results. But there’s one question you have to ask: “I heard the auto industry was recovering; how do we know these results aren’t just happening everywhere?” I know I asked that question. Well, let me show you results from some other car dealers, during the same time period, using the same measures. This first dealership (”Dealership A”) is from a market of a similar size to Rountree Moore’s in Lake City.

OK, so you can see, over the same time period, Dealership A didn’t see any of the same sorts of growth that Rountree Moore Toyota’s site did. But then, I know there’s another question I asked. “Chris, these are small dealers. How did a dealership in a large market do?”

Well, me, I’m glad you asked. “Dealership B” is from a market almost ten times as large as Rountree Moore Toyota’s. They sell significantly more cars every month. Here’s what their results looked like:

So you can see, there was something that did change in May – there was an uptick in overall shopping. More people were looking for cars than did in the first four months of the year. Dealership B saw increases in traffic, leads, visitors, page views and search engine traffic. But what’s different between their results and Rountree Moore Toyota’s? They’re proportionate. Their site’s traffic rose with the tide, and not because they did anything to make their site more findable or more useful. The implication of this, to me, is that the results are scalable- if you can do it well in a small market and get increases, you can do it in a larger market and see proportionate benefits.

Rountree Moore Toyota’s site saw significant increases in what I call “usage statistics:” statistics that show how people used your site, instead of just whether or not they got there. Chief among these is, of course, form submissions (sales leads). Rountree Moore’s rose by 71% – far greater than the “rising tide.” Other “usage statistics” include page views and visit duration. For Dealerships A and B, there was no change in the amount of time people spent on the site – Rountree Moore’s went up by 25%. Page views for Dealerships A and B moved with the tide in their respective markets – Rountree Moore’s almost doubled (+80%).

What’s my point? It’s simple: this stuff works. If you performed this same analysis on a dozen other dealership web sites, you’d see the same things. Believe me, I’ve looked. Take a look at your business’ web site. Do you think you’ve done everything you can to make it findable, accessible, and useful? Do you think you get every sales lead you can out of it?

If you look at your business honestly and the answer to those questions is “no,” then maybe you should give me a call. I can help – the numbers don’t lie. All my contact information can be found here: Contact Us.