Many of today’s trade-in customers begin their valuation process online to get a quote for what their vehicle is worth, which means it's more important than ever to have a website that facilitates their needs. These days consumers are getting these vehicle estimates from national companies that have built a strong online presence for vehicle trade-ins, versus bringing in their vehicle to the local dealership down the street from their house.
When a customer begins their online search, it’s possible they will start online with the dealership they purchased their car from, or perhaps type in something like “sell my car” in google and click on the top links that appear.
You want to make sure your website is optimized for these types of searches as well as make sure your website makes it clear to website visitors that your dealership takes trade-ins and make it easy for your online website visitors to get a trade in valuation easily online.
In this article, we’ll explore some ways you can optimize your website to drive additional trade-ins at your dealership.
5 Website Optimization Tips for Car Trade-Ins
1. Add a Trade-in/Sell your Car Link in the Navigation Menu of your Website
The way these links can help your dealership is twofold: first, users coming to your website will have an easier experience looking for the opportunity to trade in their vehicle.
Second, having main pages in the navigation of your website will also tell the search engines (i.e. Google and Bing) that it is a service your business offers.
In addition to buttons that say “Sell my car” or “Sell/Trade,” you can also add a menu item to “Value your trade in” so that you capture their intent to trade in their vehicle right on your website, even if they aren’t ready to take the final step. A tool like ClearCar can help you embed that functionality into your site. Make sure the links are visible, bold, and accessible.
2. Create a Landing Page on your Website that is Dedicated to Trade Ins
Having a dedicated page will help your site appear in the Google search when users are looking for trade-in opportunities. But to make the most of this potential, ensure you have optimized the page for SEO. How? A few easy tricks:
- Have a meta title for the page: Such as “Sell or trade-in your car online.” This will be the title of the page that appears in the Google search. Ideally keep it to around 55 characters.
- Add a meta description: This will be the blurb that appears beneath the title of the page in the search results. Keep it around 160 characters or less and make sure it gives an accurate snapshot of what visitors to your page can expect to find, for example: “Selling your car has never been easier than it is with [dealership name.] We’ll buy your car, enter info for an offer today.”
- Use your landing page to explain how the process works, what the benefits are, and answer any frequently asked questions. Include a clear call-to-action (CTA) that brings users to the next step in the trade-in process. If you have any customers that have had positive Trade In experiences you can include those on this page as well.
3. Add Display Banners in Key areas of Your Website
Don’t assume that all visitors to your site will arrive via a search or the navigation bar – make sure you advertise for your trade-in page across your site with additional banner images that help users discover that option, even if they were on your website for another reason. If you have pages that tend to get high website traffic, such as your homepage, service page, or contact page, add visual banners that link to your trade-in page. Some standard sizes for image banners are:
- Leaderboard (728 x 90 pixels)
- Large Rectangle (336 x 280)
- Half Page Banner (300 x 600)
- Medium Banner (300 x 250)
- Large Mobile Banner (320 x 100)
4. Create internal links to your trade-in landing page
Following the same logic as adding display banners, it’s important to add links to the trade-in landing page throughout your website so that users can logically and easily find the service. Here are some pages you may want to consider linking from:
- The home page: This is a page many visitors to your site will arrive at when they look at your business.
- Financing page: This makes sense for visitors determining what budget they have for a car, and you can equally link from your car payment calculator, finance center, credit application page, or other similar pages.
- Services page: This tends to be a high-traffic page on many dealership sites and it can make sense to link to your trade-in page so that visitors who are looking for a scheduled service are aware that you may have an upgrade option for them down the road.
- Specials page: This can help you entice visitors who are in the market to look for a new deal or vehicle opportunity.
Adding these internal links is helpful not only for the users, but it also tells the search engines like Google and Bing that these pages of content are important because they are being referenced on other pages. This, in turn, can help boost the authority of those pages so that they show up higher in the search results.
5. Add a user-friendly trade-in tool
Make the process of trading in a vehicle stress-free for customers by adding a trade-in tool to your website, such as ClearCar. This will help you offer pricing estimates to customers so that they arrive with more accurate expectations of their trade-in value, which in turn can make it easier for your team to manage expectations.
Optimize your Website with ClearCar
To facilitate the trade-in process for you and your customers, consider ClearCar as your Trade In valuation tool. It’s easy to add the ClearCar tool to your existing website and we have full onboarding support. Our transparency-focused technology enables customers and dealers to be on the same page and start the relationship out strong. Explore ClearCar features and benefits to get started today.
Sources
- Friedrichsen, Joe. 2021. “Best 6 Ways to Increase Vehicle Trade-Ins and Fixed Ops Profit.” Dealer Teamwork. Retrieved September 15, 2024. https://dealerteamwork.com/6-ways-to-increase-trade-ins-fixed-ops-profit/#put-links-in-nav
