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A website is highly beneficial for any automotive business, as automobiles are one of the most popular products searched for on the Internet. Although a website can be a good promotional tool for these businesses, the quick rise in mobile device sales and increase in mobile Internet use has generated a new need and opportunity to reach customers. In fact, mobile websites are proving to be quite valuable for every business interested in maintaining and then expanding its customer base.
When developing a mobile website business operators have to be a bit more creative considering the limitations of mobile devices. Unlike PCs, phones have limited screen space, no key board, no mouse, and less bandwidth. With that being said, creating a mobile specific site that provides value and functionality within to the above said constraints is crucial in order to continue reaching current and potential customers.
Below highlights the specific features that should be included in an automotive business's mobile website.
Mobile friendly design - minimum content and graphics: The design of a mobile website specific to an auto business should maintain focused content. Include only specific information related to the vehicles which is useful to the customers such as unique features, price, deals, and follow-up services. Owing to the less screen space of the mobiles, images of the vehicles should be made small and of low resolution. Avoid or limit the flash animations, videos, columns and navigation so as to give a cleaner look to the website. This also facilitates quick and easy loading.
Additionally, you can even add a click-to-call button to your mobile website. This directly initiates a call to the business, creating a great opportunity for lead generation.
SEO - for mobile search applications and engines: It isn't enough just to be accessible through mobile search engines. Your automotive business should be visible when potential customers search for your products and services. Remember, search engines operate differently for traditional websites and mobile websites. Bots and algorithms used for mobile search engines are different from those used for traditional search engines. Hence it is necessary to optimize the website for mobile access.
You need to concentrate more on automotive-specific meta tags, title tags, and keywords in your description of the vehicle. This improves your brand visibility and also gets potential customers through mobile search.
You can even optimize your website for local search which will enable your business to appear when the customer is looking for auto dealers or services within a specific area or through their GPS units.
Incorporate links in social media and blogs: Almost all Smartphone or mobile device users are active on social media websites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc. Taking that into consideration, it's a good strategy to incorporate sharing capabilities and access to all of these social platforms from your mobile website. Additionally, take the time to create fan pages so that your auto business is reinforced through multiple marketing channels. Since social media and blogs are strong marketing tools, your online mobile presence will be effectively felt by the customers. However, make sure that these features are small so that they don't inhibit the loading of your mobile website's pages.
You can even give access to your existing automotive blogs by installing specific plug-ins that will automatically customize the normal blog for mobile users.
High browser compatibility: Generally, an automotive business's mobile website is very complex due to the number of vehicle models, specific features pertaining to each one, and the variety of auto services offered. Any number of these features can make the site difficult to load. In addition, not all mobile phones support the same format for downloading the content. Lastly, make sure that your auto dealership's mobile website is compatible with browsers used by different phones like Android, iPhone, etc.
Mobile users are becoming more and more dependent on mobile sites and applications as these provide instant access to information, deals and product research. Hence, it is necessary for any company, but particularly one in the automotive business, to develop an improved, simple, and yet functional design for their mobile website so as to enhance the user experience and engagement.
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