Your dealerships website represents your online storefront. If you are to capitalize on your opportunities with “first party” leads you need to make sure that your website is maximizing all of its “Zero Moment of Truth” potential.

So you’ve got your site designed the way you want it, your specials pages are all utilized and kept up to date,yet your traffic isn’t what it should be and your conversions are low. This is probably due to consumers not readily finding the information they were looking for. This could mean that even though you purchased your dealer’s site from a reputable and even preferred provider, your sites meta data may not be set up correctly and therefore your site may not be optimized to reach its full potential. Another indication of this would be a bounce rate higher than 30%.

Your sites meta data is the index that describes each page to the search engines. In many cases a websites meta data is never adjusted after the dealers site goes live. Meta data that is set up by the provider can often be incorrect in its geo-targeting. I recently had a site go live that was optimized for a town in Florida that was practically in the middle of a swamp.

Each page on your site is indexed with a title, description and tags (figure 1). These should all correctly reflect exactly what is on that page. When search engines crawl a site they will look for continuity between what the website says is on each page and what it finds on those pages. A great place to start is by looking at the very top left portion of your browser on each page of your site. There you will find the pages title. If you are on a used car specials page and the title says something like – XYZ Motors Serving Fort Myers Florida | New and Used Cars and Trucks – then it is very likely that your site is still in its “right out of the box” settings.

An example of what the meta data on a “Used Car Specials” page could look like would be ………

Figure (1) Example of meta data fields.

Note that “fort myers” is in parentheses. This is used to when two words are being coupled together. I also included the abbreviation (ft.) If your city or town has a common nick name, it would be wise to include it.

Depending on your website and your websites provider you may or may not have easy access to your websites meta data. Generally website providers don’t like people messing around in that neck of the woods. The good news is that although you can make some mistakes, nothing is irreversible. Once you have gone through each page of your site, you will have a pretty good idea of what improvements need to be made. For example, if your “About Us Page” has the same or similar title as other pages on your site, you have some work to do. If you are not familiar with how to go about adjusting or correcting the meta data on your website, I suggest that you contact your providers support team and ask them to examine it with you.

As you add pages to your website, you will also be adding the meta data that optimizes those pages. Try and be as clear and concise as possible. Avoid “lists” and redundancies like Nissan Maxima, Nissan Altima, Nissan Sentra, Nissan Service, etc. Your title should state what is on that page and the geo area you wish to target. The description should read coherently and not just be random words, towns and zip codes. Your tags should be the key words you wish you emphasize and those words should match up with the title and description. Consistency is key in getting each page optimized on the search engines and give the consumer easy access to the exact information they are seeking.