Content is the foundation of your automotive SEO.
Just about every search engine is going to be concerned with whether or not you have written content on your website, as pages with a low word count are more likely to be marked as spam or simply omitted from the search results altogether.
While the average reader will excuse the occasional typo, there are some mistakes that are going to send them running to your competitors.
Clean, properly written content is going to be the signifier of a high-quality brand, and high quality content is going to be the best way to catch the attention of search results.
Here are five content errors that could kill your automotive SEO:
1. Bad grammar
Does your content sound like someone who speaks English as a third language?
Your content needs to sound both natural and professional.
While you do want the written content on your website to be friendly, it should not be so conversational that it lacks basic grammar.
You also do not want to use “text speech” or slang in your content, as this will also look like bad grammar, especially to the uninitiated.
If you are not sure whether or not your grammar is up to par, have someone who is skilled in the art of writing look at your content, clean it up, or even write fresh content for you.
A typo is not as big a deal as sentences that do not make sense, are awkward to read, or do not convey what you want them to convey.
Remember that your writing is a reflection of your dealership’s brand image.
Great writing will make you look good. Poor writing will make you look bad.
2. Little to no value
Your website should not contain content just to contain content.
We’ve all see those websites that just have a giant chunk of content at the bottom of the page.
It rambles on for five hundred words about nothing in particular.
While it might contain the relevant keywords, it really does not provide any valuable information or any valuable insight into the topic that the content is supposed to be about.
This happens often when there is either not really anything new to say about a topic or when those writing the content do not really know what site visitors are interested in seeing or reading about.
If your pages are full of content and use keywords appropriately, but they are still not providing you with results, it is probably because the content is not actually valuable to the people reading it.
3. Misses the call to action
When someone reads your content, do they know what you want them to do with the information they have read?
Do they know what you want them to do, period?
If the content on your webpage does not include calls to action, you are going to be missing out on a huge opportunity to encourage people to take the action that you want them to take when they arrive on your website.
For most dealerships, that action is to come down to your showroom and purchase a car.
Does your content encourage them to do that?
Or does it just present them with information that they may or may not need?
Even just including a line like, “Need more information?
Come visit our dealership at (address) and speak to one of our experience salesmen!” can totally revive your content and make it more effective.
4. Full of misspellings
A typo or two in a two-thousand word post is probably not going to put most people off.
Lots of misspellings and typos, however, is going to be a very bad thing.
It shows the reader that you did not care about this content enough to take the time to actually look for and to identify errors in that content, which, in turn, tells that reader that you do not really care about them and how the content appears to them.
Your readers are going to care about whether or not your content has been proofread.
This is a fast, easy step that you can often do yourself.
If not, you might want to hire it out or send it to someone else in the dealership before posting it on your website.
Content that is expertly proofread and is essentially free of errors is important in the world of car buying, where attention to detail signifies a high quality dealership.
5. No user friendliness
Is it easy for people to find the content they are looking for on your website?
Does one blog post about a topic recommend other blog posts on your blog about the same topic?
Is it easy to share your content to social media?
If your content is user-friendly, people will stick around for a longer amount of time and they are more likely to market your content for you, to their friends and relatives via social media.
You can make sure that your content is easy to find by having simple, functional navigation, and you can ensure that users move smoothly from relevant topic to relevant topic by linking between pages on your website and blog posts on your blog.
The average reader will forgive a few mistakes when it comes to your content.
They will not, however, forgive all mistakes.
Making one of these five errors could cripple what would otherwise be effective content for your automotive SEO campaign.
