The internet has already altered the car shopping experience and smartphones have gone a step further.
A recent study conducted by Autoshopper has revealed that more than one in every three people who use the internet to shop for vehicles such as cars, SUVs and trucks, have conducted a mobile search on a smartphone or tablet while actually standing in a dealership.
That represents an increase of a massive 29 percent over the number of people who were doing it in 2013.
Considering the trend toward mobile search, that really doesn’t come as too much of a surprise. After all, earlier in 2015, searches over smartphones and tablets surpassed those that took place over PCs, according to statistics released by Google. It was that trend that brought about the massive wave nicknamed “mobilegeddon” in which Google – and then later, Bing – changed their algorithms in order to favor websites that were mobile friendly, when a search was conducted over mobile devices.
Now, dealerships are paying close attention to mobile search, as it is having a considerable impact on sales.
Since Google results now favor mobile friendly websites, dealerships have discovered that if they want to be able to stand out to their customers, then this is the type of experience that they are going to have to provide. After all, the last thing that they want to do is have a potential customer standing on their showroom floor while discovering the offerings of a competitor on their smartphones because that rival had a mobile friendly website and therefore received better search results.
Of course, the experience goes far beyond search. As dealerships battle over customers, they are now trying to create a far more seamless experience between the device and shopping in person, so that the two will work together.
Not only are most dealership websites already highly optimized for mobile search, they are also designed to provide a much broader experience that will allow consumers to be able to view additional resources that will help them to make their decisions and to learn what they want to know about the vehicles that they are considering.
