You probably have a morning routine.
You might wake up, brush your teeth, have breakfast, read the newspaper, and then head off to work.
These routines are important—they prepare you for the day and help you get into the right mindset to do your work.
When you are taking on an automotive SEO strategy, habits are just as important to its success as they are to success in your everyday life.
Creating positive work habits is integral to making sure that the work actually gets done.
There are more than 100 billion searches on Google every month.
That is a huge number of searchers.
And while only a small fraction of them are looking for you, if you do not have a great automotive SEO campaign, you are going to be missing out on all of those potential customers.
Here are seven habits that make your search engine optimization more successful:
1. Become a data stalker.
If you’re not taking a look at your data every single day, now is the time to start doing that.
This is the only way you can start to notice trends in your rankings and attribute them to events, like sending an email newsletter or a specific social media promotion kicking off.
Looking at your data only once a week or once a month is generally not enough to fully understand what is affecting that data and how you can use it in the future to improve your rankings.
It’s also important to take a look at your bounce rate to see if there are specific events that cause a spike in bounces.
2. Do an automotive SEO audit every week.
For some optimizers, an audit is a yearly or bi-yearly event.
It doesn’t have to be.
In fact, if you want your strategy to be successful, you want to be auditing it as often as possible.
This means that you spend some time each week looking at your analytics, looking at your strategy, and determining what needs to be changed 0or built upon.
Start by blocking out time in your schedule to do this.
Then, write down the goals that you want to achieve during that week.
Use a tool like SEMRush or Screaming Frog to crawl your website and then complete at least one of the things that crawl tells you to change.
3. Start looking beyond your direct competitors.
You probably know exactly which dealerships in your area you are competing against, but what about competition on the broader scale.
For example, you might be the only dealership in your area that offers a certain brand, but if there is another dealership with the same brand in the next town over, only a twenty minute drive away, you are competing with them, even indirectly.
Look at how they are doing their search engine optimization and if it could be affecting your market.
If it is, it’s time to start targeting their customers, too.
4. Get better at budgeting.
Your SEO strategy doesn’t just cost you time, it costs you money, too.
It might be a fraction of your overall marketing budget, but it is still going to cost you money.
You need to make sure that money is going to the right place and is getting you the right results.
This obviously means that you will have to have a tight hand on your data and you need to have a really good idea of where your money is going.
If you know where it is going, you can attribute results to that money and you can see which expenses are working for you and which are not.
5. Develop a love for the hustle.
A successful search engine optimization strategy for your dealership is going to require work.
And if you don’t enjoy the work, you’re probably not going to do it or, at the very least, you’re not going to do it as well as you would if you did love it.
While you don’t have to be obsessed with it, you should develop an appreciation for it.
You might not love the grind, but you should love the results enough that you are willing to put in the time and effort that the results require.
6. Be more strategic about your schedule.
SEO doesn’t have to consume your entire life. In fact, because you are probably also trying to run a dealership, it shouldn’t.
But you should devote a little bit of time to it every day.
Setting up a schedule for yourself so you know exactly what you need to do that day, how much time it should take you, and how you are going to record your results is a great way to both motivate yourself to get the work done and to make sure that nothing falls through the cracks.
7. Build an authentic voice.
Perhaps nothing is so important to today’s consumer as authenticity.
A lot of you work is going to be creating content that your site visitors are going to read.
Do you have an authentic voice?
Do they enjoy reading it?
Do they engage and connect with it?
Or do they feel like they are being talked at or condescended to?
Knowing your audience is an extremely important aspect of building a voice that they are going to listen to.
Only then will you be able to create a strategy that speaks to them and fulfills their needs.
