I don't even know where to start. There is sooooo much you can do.
Visual:
Next time you're at a chain restaurant that has pictures on the menu, see if you're not drawn to order from the pictures first. Most of these restaurants photograph the thing they want to sell the most of and put it on the menu because 8 times out of 10 people order by pictures. This also applies to websites. If your site is more graphically appealing to a consumer, you will set yourself apart from your competition.
Video makes a huge difference. When we added the photo to video stitching on our inventory our time on site jumped 2 minutes almost over night. Our videos of Christine were watched more and even though I haven't put the pencil on it yet, I am willing to bet we had a slight jump in closing ratio on our leads coming from Checkered Flag.com.
Content:
If you have written and maintained your content with the customer and SEO in mind you can capture better/more search engine traffic than your competition. You can do this by integrating a blog, creating tons of landing pages with heavy content areas, rewriting any of those pages your site host has auto-fill stuff on.....basically it is owning your site and continuing to add to it.
Your website is the best showroom you have - it costs pennies in comparison, it can look anyway you want it to, you can change it after the windows are installed, you have more ups hitting the virtual lot, and you can continue making it the biggest store in town. It blows my mind that a dealer will spend $20 Million on a physical facility and then sign up for the $575 a month template website.
I'm getting on a tangent with that, but I wanted to prove my point about content and expansion. It is important. It is overlooked, but it could be the easiest thing you do that has the biggest impact.
If you're looking for tools to help you with this, an integrated blog is what I advise going with. But you should have the ability to add pages to your website and that is certainly another way to do it.
Flow:
Once you've got a lot of content you need to figure out how to make it flow with your website. This is where analytics come into play. Your site host should have a report based on Bounce Rates. Sort your bounce rates based on the highest to the lowest and start looking at each page with the highest bounce rate. What can you do to get people to leave that page and go to another? Add more content? Add a video? Add more buttons to other pages? You're going to have to figure that out.
What about pages that aren't being looked at as often as you'd like? Maybe they need a spot in the Navigation. Maybe you should link it to another relevant page. Maybe we should take a step back and think about how a customer views your website. Do they skip past your homepage to jump straight into inventory? Are they spending 40 seconds on your homepage trying to figure out what your phone number is? Is your per-page-bounce rate really high on your inventory pages, your form submission pages, or map view pages?
Get an understanding of your analytics and you'll be able to build a website that speaks better to your customers.
Specials and Incentives:
Is your inventory being looked at 80% of the time and your specials being looked at 5% of the time? Have you considered putting your specials on your inventory? Of course, this leads down the road of: do your customers even care about your specials? That's a totally different matter that speaks to your marketing methods, but it is a valid question to ask when specials pages have a high bounce rate.
Inventory:
Is it photographed and commented? Does it list the right equipment and options? How is the flow inside the inventory? If a customer wanted to look at 3 different cars on your site, how easy is it to do that? Does your website flow like Cobalt wants it to, or does it flow like YOU want it to? Have you tried buying something on Amazon, Best Buy, or NewEgg lately? How does your website's inventory flow compare to theirs?
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I realize you weren't asking for a lesson on things. You are asking for what my website does better than others. Personally, mine was just redone and we still have a lot of work to do, but I wanted to do a better job with the basics. Listed above are the basics in my opinion. It is too early to tell if ours will be better than any other dealer website, so I left some of the thoughts that were going through my head while we were redesigning it. Thoughts that helped me to build something better.
Do we have a bunch of plug-ins and new products in our site that our competitors do not - OF COURSE! I can talk about those later, as a few are still betas.
