Get creative with your website’s content to build your online destination
The text, video and graphic elements that build your online destination (a.k.a. your website) work to share your unique value proposition with shoppers and help boost your SEO value to get more customers clicking through to your virtual doorstep. When someone searches for a new motorcycle, Google wants to show them the results that they’ll find the most helpful. Websites with relevant multimedia content and rich text will place higher on the search results page.
You can generate high-quality website content that will provide solutions for your customers and boost your SEO by carrying over your in-store branding, featuring your expertise and implementing video and image elements.
- Branding: Your brand is important. It’s how shoppers distinguish you from the competition, and it showcases your business and what it stands for. To make your business as memorable as possible for online and offline shoppers, your branding should be consistent everywhere. If you have a logo, slogan or specific colors you use in your store or ads, be sure to carry that over to your website. This will help shoppers know they’re in the right place when they visit your store after checking out your website or vice versa.
- Expertise: Your website is a great place to show off your staff and your years of experience. Your “About Us” section is an easy place to fit in bios of your sales and service team, highlight the number of years your dealership has been operating and mention the areas where you really excel. Using keywords in your “About Us” section can also help your SEO. Phrases that mention the geographic area you serve, your top brands or the type of units you sell can go a long way. For example, saying “We’ve been the #1 dealer of new and used Honda motorcycles in Milwaukee since 2012” could help you rank higher in search results for new or used Honda motorcycles in your area.
- Videos: According to YouTube, 90 percent of shoppers find videos helpful when making purchasing decisions. Fortunately, you don’t need to be Stephen Spielberg to create engaging video content for your website. Simple solutions like sharing OEM video content, creating a video slideshow of inventory photos or doing a quick walk-around tour of a new unit can capture a shopper’s interest and get them in-store to learn more.
- Images: Quality images make your site visually engaging, and they’re relatively easy to incorporate with options ranging from banner graphics to inventory photos. Too many large images can make a site run slowly, so make keep your images smaller than the width of your page and use a maximum resolution of 72 dpi to keep your site running smoothly. You can also optimize your images for SEO by tagging them with alt-text and descriptive image names. Google can’t see images, so these elements tell it whether an image is relevant to the content on the page. The more relevant content you have in one place, the more likely your page is to rank highly in search results.
Want to learn more about how you can optimize your online destination? Join me for ARI’s next HelpForce Live! webinar, “How to Fuel Your Online Destination to Sell More Stuff!”, on Thursday, April 14 at 3:00 p.m. EDT. Click here to register!
Colleen Malloy is ARI’s director of marketing. Malloy has more than a decade of experience in the powersports industry and previously served as the editor of Motorcycle & Powersports News. ARI creates award-winning software solutions that help equipment manufacturers, distributors and dealers Sell More Stuff! — online and in-store. ARI removes the complexity of selling and servicing new and used inventory, parts, garments and accessories for customers in automotive tire and wheel, powersports, outdoor power equipment, marine, RV and white goods industries. More than 22,000 equipment dealers, 195 distributors and 140 manufacturers worldwide leverage ARI’s website and eCatalog platforms to Sell More Stuff!
Email: colleen.malloy@arinet.com
Phone: 414/973-4323
Website: arinet.com
