Today’s approach to automotive SEO is more complicated and complex than even five years ago.

If you had a website ten years ago, it would be very easy to predict what would boost your page ranking and what would lower it.

It was inexpensive to implement the most effective techniques and you could almost predict by how much your ranking would jump based on what strategies you implemented.

At the dawn of search engines, all you needed to rank a website was the right keyword, placed enough times on your website.

Simple and fast.

Today, SEO is a conglomeration of numerous different strategies, all designed to convince an almost omniscient search engine that a website is going to be valuable for a searcher.

What was once simply a case of who had the search phrase the highest number of times on their website has become a meritocracy that many dealerships are finding it difficult to break into.

In order to really be successful with SEO, dealerships have to change their entire attitude towards SEO.

Here’s what you need to do:

Change Where You’re Getting Your Information From

Automotive SEO is going to have a lot in common with most other types of SEO, but what works for a large, completely online business is not going to work for a business that relies on people actually coming to that business’s physical location to make a big purchase.

Selling cars is different from selling just about anything else on the planet.

Except for a home, this is the largest purchase that the average person will make.

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Because of the size of the purchase, there is a lot of anxiety related to buying a car.

Even those who make more than enough to cover their car payments will still be hesitant before making the plunge.

This means that your SEO campaign has to have a slightly different focus than an SEO campaign for a business that sells shoes or clothing.

While both businesses might require people to come to an actual physical store to make a purchase, the higher price of the vehicle means getting your potential customers into an entirely different mindset.

Most people will not agonize over a $20 purchase for days or weeks. That is, however, how long a person might spend trying to decide whether or not they are going to buy a car.

For this reasons, it’s time to start carefully considering where you get your automotive SEO advice from.

Are you getting it from blogs and experts that know anything about SEO? Or are you getting it from more generalized sources?

While those generalized sources do often have something interesting to offer to your knowledge base, they may also make recommendations that are simply not applicable to your dealership and its website.

How do you know what advice to take?

The first place to look would be blogs, websites, and experts that deal specifically with automotive SEO.

These are the blogs, websites, and experts that know what it takes to get your dealership specifically to rank, because they have been working in this particular niche of the industry and have seen what it has taken for other dealerships to rank highly.

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If you are trying to use generalized advice for your very specific and unique niche, you are not going to see the boost in rankings that you need and it is time to change where you are getting your advice from.

It is also important to note that a lot of what is being written about SEO today is derivative.

It is theoretical at best, written by people that might have studied optimization but do not actually do it for their own websites or jobs.

It’s easy to talk about how important meta descriptions are when you run a big SEO blog that has probably not had to adjust their SEO campaign for years and still remains at the top of their relevant search results.

Even big SEO companies can spread misinformation about optimization, simply because they are not actually in the trenches, practicing it every day.

Invest More Time and More Money

Because time equals money, it might be enough to say just that you need to invest more money into your search engine optimization.

Something many SEO experts hear is frustration over the efficacy of a campaign, only to discover that the dealership is investing almost no time and money into that campaign.

It can be difficult to trust that your SEO is going to be effective, especially because it might take weeks or even months before you start to see your SEO succeed.

This is a long-term investment and it is always difficult to watch money leave, without seeing immediate returns.

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One of the biggest problems in the SEO community right now is an overemphasis in the risks of starting an SEO campaign.

There is blog after blog talking about how one wrong misstep and plunge your website into obscurity.

This leads most dealership owners to be very wary about investing time and money into their campaign, believing that if they make even one wrong move, they’ll see all of their hard work and monetary investment disappear.

The truth is that SEO, especially local, automotive SEO is still fairly predictable, easy to break into, and simple.

There is very little that you can do to seriously tarnish your online reputation or to harm you’re your campaign.

When you work with a professional who is well-versed in automotive SEO, you rarely have to worry about whether or not your campaign is going to work—you’ll see it working every single day.