If you are completely new to automotive SEO, you might not know where to start.
Many websites will try to make search engine optimization look complicated, so complicated that the average person will not even attempt it.
And while it can get complicated, it does not have to be.
Here are five of the very best tips for those who are new to automotive SEO:
1. Make sure your site is responsive.
All search engines (but especially Google), have started to put far more emphasis on how mobile friendly your website is.
It is now so important that whether or not your website is mobile friendly can affect your ranking even when on laptop and desktop queries.
Mobile search is now far bigger and far more important than desktop search and it is only going to become more and more important as time goes on.
It is especially important for dealerships, as many of your potential customers might be using their smartphones to look at your website while they are already out car shopping at another dealership.
If you want to attract those people to your website, you need to have a website that functions properly on mobile devices.
If you do not have a great mobile experience, potential customers are not only not going to use your website, they are also not going to visit your dealership.
How accessible you are online is related directly to how accessible you appear to be in real life.
Many dealerships, especially those that have been operating for decades, do not know or understand the importance of a response website.
The short version is this: the majority of your potential customers are now searching on mobile devices, so you need to have a website that is compatible with these devices.
2. Make sure your social media campaign is strong.
Your social media strategy is very important to automotive search engine optimization.
Search engines have started to care more and more about your social standing when ranking related webpages.
It affects your ranking in a number of ways, including giving you a venue for marketing the content you write, helping you drive traffic back to your website, increasing your social signals, and acting as a link-building platform.
It plays a number of important roles and gives you the tools to actually improve many of the most important SEO strategies.
One of the most significant ways social media boosts your search engine optimization is through social signals, which are essentially votes in favor of your website’s legitimacy.
Social signals have started to replace linking. It’s fairly easy to fake backlinks, but it is very difficult to fake social media attention, as every social media has tools built in to recognize and delete fake users and bot traffic.
3. Write fresh, new content.
You probably already know that you should not copy content from another source and use it on your website.
But if your website is using the exact same content that you were using five years ago, this could actually be just as bad for your automotive SEO as using stolen content.
At the very least, it will be dragging you down and making it nearly impossible for you to get a high ranking.
Google only wants the most updated content for their searchers, and even if the content you write five years ago is still mostly relevant, they are still going to give preference to the content that is less than a year old, simply because it is newer and therefore less likely to include anachronistic information.
4. Link from webpage to webpage.
You should do this for two reasons.
First, when you link from one webpage to another webpage on your site, you are making it easy for search engines to crawl and index your website.
When they crawl a page, they catalog links, which signify new webpages that they need to crawl, and then crawl those webpages.
Getting the search engine to crawl your page faster is always a good thing.
Second, linking back to yourself makes it easier for readers to find more relevant information on a subject they are interested in.
Once they are already on your website or blog, you can keep them there by including links within your content to other content that they will want to read.
Have you ever gotten lost in Wikipedia, simply because you were reading one entry, and then you clicked on a link in that entry to another entry, and suddenly, you found yourself ten pages away from where you originally began?
This is essentially what you can do by linking within your own website.
5. Monitor everything.
This is one of the things that most people who are new to automotive SEO forget to do.
They might do keyword research, add alt tags to their pictures, take part in link building, and yet they will forget to go back and actually monitor the progress of those strategies.
Luckily, there are lots of cheap and even free monitoring tools, including Google Analytics, which make it extremely easy to see how your website is progressing and get alerts about any flags your website might be incurring.
Monitoring not only your progress, but how it differs from where you were and what you did to progress to where you are now is one of the most essential parts of creating a dealership website that is successful in the search rankings.
It will tell you what is working for you, what is not working, where you should be putting your efforts and where you should not be putting them.
It’s the most basic and most important thing you should be doing to improve your campaigns.
