In this week’s Thought Starter video, we highlight 5 quick tips for dealers to help them quickly improve website navigation. Check out the video here.

Video Transcript

Hi, I’m Kayla from Dealer Teamwork bringing you a Thought Starter for the week. This week I want to start off with a question, when’s the last time you evaluated your website navigation? If you can’t remember, it’s time to do it!

The top-level links in your navigation and in the drop-down menus are meant to help shoppers find what they’re looking for easily. Unfortunately, this is commonly overlooked and you often see the navigation bar unorganized and cluttered with too many links.

Here are five simple items you can inspect and improve right away!

1. Remove low traffic pages from navigation: Audit your top pages to see which pages shoppers visit. Pages without traffic or that don’t convert should be removed. Do you have priority pages that don’t get enough traffic? This is your opportunity to prune low-priority pages, reorganize, or add the priority pages needed to help reach your goals.
2. Eliminate duplicate pages: Do you have multiple pages that do the same thing? For example, vehicle information pages and research pages are often very similar. You can either create links between them, consolidate this content, or redirect one page to another so they don’t compete against each other.
3. Keep top-level nav simple: The goal of the navigation links should be to locate the key departments of the dealership. So, why not highlight them within the navigation? For example, New Inventory, Used Inventory, Certified, Specials, Schedule Service, Get Approved, Sell Your Car, Contact Us. Add other priority sections as needed, such as Lifted Trucks, Loaner Cars, Body Shop, etc. But always keep in mind that this should be as simple and straightforward as possible.
4. Keep sub-nav simple: If your menu bar is labeled properly, links don’t need to be repeated in each drop-down menu.
5. Consider mobile experience: Many websites have separate navigation menus, one for mobile and one desktop; they both don’t need to be the same. Use your data to understand which pages are visited from different devices. This relates to keeping nav simple. The more links you have in navigation, the harder your site is going to be to use for mobile shoppers, don’t lose opportunities by having messy navigation! Interact with your site on a phone, if it’s challenging to navigate through, you need to scale back.

If you need help auditing your website navigation, we can help! A few weeks ago we featured our website and marketing audit in a Thought Starter. You can get help with this and more by signing up for a complimentary audit. That’s all for this week, be sure to check back next week for another Dealer Teamwork Thought Starter, thanks for watching!