The success of your car dealership entirely depends on the automotive SEO of your website. If your site is optimized according to the guidelines listed by Google, you will gain an upper hand on your competition. This enables you to rank better on Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs), which in turn transforms into a significant boost in web traffic. As you start gaining more visitors, you have increased chances of conversions and making sales. This guarantees that you generate good profits. Therefore, there is no doubt that automotive SEO is crucial for laying the foundation of your car dealership businesses. Follow these 10 commandments below to boost your automotive SEO:
- Create Quality Content that Attracts – Google’s latest Hummingbird Algorithms have become more intelligent concerning analyzing content and ranking websites. Focus on providing the user value in order to benefit from improved rankings. Place strict emphasis on giving quality content to your visitors and prospects and forget about writing for Search Engines. Bear in mind that viewers are fed up of reading the same re-written content found on all websites. Avoid being redundant and display yourself as an industry expert with each piece. The more unique the approach is, the better your chances are of attracting a wider audience.
- Analyze and Use Targeted Keywords – One of the best ways to help your website rank better is adding relevant and targeted keywords to your articles, blogs, PRs, and eBooks. If your content is good and generates great interest, your ranking will increase on the targeted keywords. This positions you higher on the SERPs of Google. However, it is imperative that you avoid going for keywords that are too common, as they may have a lot of competition already. Choose ones that get good traffic, but aren’t being targeted by websites yet. Most importantly, don’t forget about location-targeted keywords.
- Clear and Well-Optimized Webpage Structure – When it comes to optimizing your website, it is essential that you create a clear webpage structure. Follow the guidelines listed by Google and ensure that you are adding optimized URLs, hyperlinks, alt tags, Meta descriptions, and Meta titles. All of these can help you position your website higher; as these are all elements crawled by website crawlers. If you work hard on differentiating yourself in each aspect, you can definitely position your automotive website higher than the competition.
- Create a Smooth, Fast, and Responsive Website – Before adding any sort of content on your website, it is imperative that you focus greatly on the design phase. Place strong emphasis on designing a car dealership website that is fast and responsive. Bear in mind you will be posting many images and creating a tremendous amount of pages for each car. All website elements must be compressed. To create a rich customer-experience, you need to have an automotive website that is quick in navigating and responsive to each click.
- Personalize User Experiences – Integrate Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Data Management System (DMS) data within your website. Upon integrating these tools, your site will be able to track viewers and prospects the best way possible. It may say something like, “Hello Michael,” or if the prospect is visiting your site more than once, it might show “It’s great to see you again Michael, is it time to service your car?” Each prospect should have a different version of your site available, which focuses on subjects that they are interested in.
- Create a Personal Brand Image – A few years ago, SEO was all about pleasing search engines to rank higher and get more business. However, things have changed now. Nothing is more important than generating a good experience for your customers. This means, you must offer VALUE to each prospect. This can be done by creating a personal brand image, one that shows your interest for vehicles in a genuine manner. Your enthusiasm should be readily displayed on your website and blog. Use mediums like infographics, pictures, and video for showing the true side of your dealership.
- Stay Current and Well-Informed – With manufacturers releasing new make/models and technologies every day, you need to stay well-informed in order to provide customers with the most current information available. The average internet user will check out several websites, before arriving to yours. Give them a chance to stay by showing that you focus on providing updated and current information. This only increases your trustworthiness, resulting in more referrals. When you gain more referrals, your site gets prominent in the eyes of Google, helping you rank better.
- Create a Mobile-Optimized Website – Customers are more active on their mobile phones than they ever were on laptops and computers. Majority of the traffic received by business websites comes from mobile. If you don’t have a mobile-optimize version of your website yet, you are missing a huge target audience. Keep up with the basics and create a site entirely for mobile. Pages that are not optimized for mobile may end up receiving high click-back rates and negative reviews.
- Focus on Social Networking – Go the extra mile in spreading the word about your business and its products and services by creating profiles on social media pages. Interact with your customers, reply to queries/questions, and seek advice. Social media is the top tool for improving reputation. Begin engaging prospects by creating profiles on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or LinkedIn.
- Monitor and Analyze SEO Strategies – Last, but not the least, makes it a habit to monitor your entire SEO strategy right from the beginning, which includes analyzing your Search Engine Marketing (SEM), Content Development, Pay-Per-Click (PPC), and Social Media Marketing (SMM) strategies. This way, you can figure out what strategies work and what do not. You can constantly improvise and optimize your strategies to generate more traffic and increase chances of ranking better on SERPs.
Are you looking for ways to help your car dealership rank better on Google? If so, then don’t hesitate on following the tips mentioned above.
