Every business, including an auto dealership, wants its website to appear in the top rankings of Google’s Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs) in order to boost sales and conversions of their products. However, in order to get into the top rankings, a lot of effort is required on your part. You must work on your automotive search engine optimization (SEO) to improve your website’s visibility.
Unlike PPC, that boasts short-term results, automotive SEO is a long-term strategy that can improve your business’ online presence. However, as simple SEO may seem, it actually isn’t. There are obstacles and pitfalls along the way to achieving success. With a large degree of certainty, there are also plenty of things that you must avoid doing.
That’s why in today’s article, we will be sharing some common SEO mistakes to avoid.
Poor Navigation – Slow Site Speed
When it comes to improving the reputation, visibility, and brand image of your business, it is imperative that you work on your site’s navigation. Bear in mind that Google places a great deal of importance on the speed of a side. Therefore, if your website is operating slowly and offering poor navigation, you can’t expect to gain much rep. In fact, it will only diminish the user’s experience, forcing them to click-back and visit another site that gives them access to the details they want in a faster way. Here are some common mistakes that can adversely affect your site’s speed:
- Failure in using some form of caching
- Lack of or non-existence of G-Zip compression
- Over-usage of third party libraries and advertisements
- Non-Minified CSS files, JavaScript, and Heavy Visualizations
- Super-high-quality and over-sized images that take too long to load
Avoid making these mistakes and work on improving your site’s speed by gaining specific insights and recommendations from Google by testing your site from Google’s reputable and famous PageSpeed Insights Tool. Take the time out to go through each recommendation and enhance your site’s responsiveness, speed, and performance to the best of your ability. It isn’t necessary for you to hit the 100-point mark. However, try your best to make as much enhancements as possible.
Overloading Your Content with Keywords
Stuffing nonsensical compilations of keywords in an automotive article was an effective way of placing a website on the top pages of Google, a few years ago. However, nowadays doing so could result in your website being penalized. That’s not all: stuffing your content with keywords can also turn off the people who are being driven to your site. Since all they will notice is “fluff”, it can be difficult for you to retain them into checking your automotive site out.
For new comers this is an easy automotive SEO mistake to make, but regardless of what everyone tells you – it is imperative that your content doesn’t come out as forced or unnatural. Therefore, avoid stuffing keywords at all costs, regardless of whether you are optimizing your content, alt tags, Meta titles, or Meta descriptions. Google now uses the Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) technology, which can easily determine the similarities in phrases used. To avoid being blacklisted, ensure all keywords are appropriate, readable, targeted, and relevant.
Non-Keyword-Focused Content
Overloading your automotive content with keywords is disliked by Google. However, it’s to write a piece of content or article that isn’t particularly focused on one topic or keyword. Avoid the mistake of going off on tangents and covering too many diverse automotive subjects in one post. All content must provide value to your readers and not using targeted keywords will only diminish relevancy to your services. Bear in mind that Google’s main aim is to serve the most accurate results on SERPs.
If you want your automotive website to rank better, it is imperative that you create relevant content with appropriate and targeted keywords on one particular topic. Answer the question or fill the informational needs by providing the most-trusted and best answers. You have to play your role in fulfilling Google’s ultimate quest and in return, you will benefit from improved rankings, good reputation, and amazing brand value.
Using Plagiarized Content
The whole purpose of creating your own automotive website is to provide value to readers regarding your mission, aims, and goals. If you are selling new or used cars, the last thing you should do is copy and paste reviews of cars from other publications. Not only can this drastically reduce your rankings in SERPs, but you can also be penalized by Google. In fact, the leading search engine will not hesitate at all in blacklisting your website.
This will make it even more difficult for you to get visitors, customers, and clients to visit your website or dealership location. The best way to avoid this is to hire your own automotive content development professional who has the relevant experience to emphasize and provide information regarding the latest news, trends, and hearsay about cars, technologies, and popular brands. It is your duty to ensure all the content on your website is genuine, original, unique, and appealing.
Non-Mobile-Friendly Website
When it comes to creating a successful automotive website, it is vital that you cover all-important SEO bases. Among these, include creating a mobile-friendly website. Bear in mind that your mobile rankings plays a vital role in how your automotive website appears on Google and on the browsers of mobile users. If you’re website isn’t optimized for a smaller screen, you may be missing out linking and communication with a huge targeted marketed.
The importance of a non-desktop browsing experience has increased significantly over the years. Google is well aware of this fact and has subsequently been placing a lot of focus on its updates and algorithms. A year ago, Google even rolled out a new algorithm, which was given the name of “Mobilegeddon” from many SEO professionals. Therefore, if you want your automotive website to go the extra mile, do not hesitate in hiring an expert who can create a mobile-optimized version of your site.
So, if you want your automotive website to gain huge success and rank better on SERPs, make sure to avoid the abovementioned mistakes.
