You have been working on your automotive SEO campaign for months or even years.
You think that you finally have it figured out, that you know what to do and how to do it, but then, slowly, you start to realize that the initial spike in page visits has started to level off and that your ranking in the search results has started to plateau.
Often, SEO will start to become less effective if you do not work on it regularly, but you can still see your efforts reward you with fewer and fewer returns if you are not working on the right strategies.
Are you concerned that your SEO might be stagnant?
If you are, here are seven quick fixes to get it moving again:
1. Work on your internal link profile.
Search engines love links.
While external links, back to your dealership’s website, are of the utmost importance, internal links can also improve a stagnant SEO strategy.
Internal links are a good way for you to prove to the search engines that your website is authoritative and highly relevant.
It also makes it easier for your visitors to get around your website, which is something that search engines are always going to boost.
Make sure that your navigation links are clear and concise and add opportunities to link from one page of your website to another as often as possible.
2. Make sure your content is as good as it can possibly be.
Content that is just fine will perform well at first, but as your site visitors cease to find it interesting and relevant, you will see your SEO start to bottom out.
If you do not have enough content or that content is essentially just filler, you are going to find it difficult to get people and search engines to pay attention to your dealership.
How can you improve it? Start by making sure that you have enough content on each page.
Every single page should have at least 300 words on it, in addition to any other media that you choose to add.
Cut down on the fluff and make sure that every word you include on those pages has a purpose and is informational and useful for the people you want to read it.
3. Change up your meta titles and descriptions.
If you are seeing reduced click through rates, it is definitely worth your time to make sure that your meta titles and descriptions are as click-worthy as possible.
Write your titles and descriptions with the intent of the searcher in mind.
For example, the people searching out websites like yours are probably looking for vehicles to buy.
Have you crafted your titles and descriptions with that in mind?
Does your title say, “Click here! This website has the information that you are looking for!”?
It is a mistake to assume that people will click on your link simply because it is there.
Use the space you are provided to entice searchers to click on your link.
4. Determine which pages are not performing and refocus them.
If you have pages that are simply not getting clicks anymore, you might not be optimizing them in the right way.
Specifically, you might not have chosen the appropriate keyword for that page.
Maybe you are trying fight for visibility in a very competitive search result or you are battling companies that have far more resources than you do.
Maybe their websites are simply more authoritative.
If you are using a keyword that has a very high competition or for which the competition are simply better equipped, it might be time to refocus those underperforming pages on a keyword that might not have as high a search volume but for which you will actually be able to rank.
5. Seek out brand mentions.
When someone buys a car from your showroom, they might post about it on Facebook or Twitter.
A local newspaper might write a story that mentions your dealership.
There are lots of opportunities for your dealership’s name to show up online that you might not be capitalizing on.
This is one of the best ways to build external links and it is actually pretty fast and easy.
All you really need is to set up a Google Alert for your brand name and you’ll be automatically notified when someone mentions something about you online.
You can then ask them to include a link to your website.
6. Reclaim links that are broken.
Sometimes a blogger or a journalist or a website will put a link in a post or a page that, over time, becomes broken.
While this is a little more labor intensive than just looking for brand mentions, if you can seek out these links (which, for example, might be to your competitors), and ask the site owner to replace the broken link with a link to your website, you will have built an easy external link that lends you some authority and helps to underscore your relevancy.
If you want to be able to do this quickly, you might consider getting a browser extension that automatically shows you which links are live and which ones are broken.
7. Reduce your 404 errors.
Search engines really do not like 404 errors, but if you have an internal or external linking strategy (and you should), they are possible.
If you have links and then move the pages that those links connect to, you are going to get 404 pages.
There are online tools that help you discover where your 404 errors are so that you can set up redirects or ask the people who have links back to those pages that no longer exist to update them to the correct links.
