It is always difficult to do something you’ve never done before for the first time.
Many dealerships will handle their own automotive SEO campaigns and find that they do not really know what they need to do or how to do those things in order to be successful with their campaigns.
Understanding the basics of writing for search engine optimization can make it much easier to get a great rank in relevant search results.
Here’s what you need to know:
Your Primary Goal Should Be Quality
When starting to create content, many people put too much emphasis on incorporating a certain keyword a specific number of times or in specific places that they forget that it doesn’t matter how great their keyword strategy is if the content itself is not worth reading.
A good rule of thumb that you will likely hear from every serious SEO writer is that you should be creating content first and foremost for the reader and not for the machine.
If it works for the reader, it will work for the machine, in general.
Especially after you have been working on your campaign for a long time and you are starting to run out of topics and ways to make those topics valuable to your readers, it might seem like a good idea to sacrifice quality and just continue pumping out the same quantity, with the same keywords, just to keep your ranking or to continue to rise.
Here’s why this is a bad idea: search engines care more about quality than they do about quantity.
If you start to produce low-quality content that basically rehashes something you have already said in another post just in new words, or is just not as in-depth or useful as your content has always been, the search engines will know.
It might sound paranoid to say that search engines can tell how quality your writing is, but as the algorithms have become more and more complicated, they have become able not just to tell whether or not the surrounding content is relevant to the keywords used in that content, but also whether or not that content has something new to say about a topic.
This is all in an effort to determine which content is not only the most relevant to a search, but which has the best things to say about the information the searcher is looking for.
If you don’t have anything original to say about a topic, it might be better not to say anything at all if you are looking to improve your automotive SEO strategy.
Be Careful about the Information You Disseminate
One of the major goals of blogging as part of your automotive SEO strategy is to help build authority online and trust amongst your readers.
People want to buy, especially when making a big purchase like a vehicle, from someone that they trust and who has already proven to be knowledgeable about their own industry.
While the content itself might be designed to get more people to your website, if that content doesn’t inspire respect and isn’t obviously written by someone who has years of experience working with vehicles, it could actually be doing more harm than good.
You want the people who read your content to be able to trust you.
You are going to automatically be accountable for the information that your disseminate, so you need to make sure that it is the most relevant, up to date, useful information that you can find.
Because you are already an expert in the industry, this won’t be that difficult.
This doesn’t mean, however, that you should fact check yourself from time to time, especially if you are not one hundred percent sure about the information you are presenting.
Stick to a Schedule
As important as it is to be committed to quality and as important as it is to know that you are only disseminating the very best information to your readers, it is also important to choose a schedule and to stick to it.
Why bother doing this?
Because if you post sporadically, people will not know when they should come to see something new on your blog.
If you post every other week sometimes and then three days in a row one week, people will begin to realize that they cannot trust you to put out regular content.
A schedule also encourages you to write and stockpile your posts so that if there is ever a week when you simply do not have time to work on a blog post, you already have one or five waiting in the wings to keep you covered.
Deadlines are extremely important in the writing process.
Not only do they provide motivations, they simply make it easier for your readers to return to your blog and to get the information they want.
It helps you maintain your writer-reader relationship.
If you post without a set schedule or only sporadically, at some point, there will come a time when they will get fed up of waiting for a new post and will just go elsewhere for their information.
Don’t Forget to Market
Last, but not least, you need to remember to market the blogs that you write.
They are going to do you some good just by posting them, but they are going to do you the most good if you remember to effectively market them.
This means putting them on your dealership’s Facebook, Google+, and Twitter accounts and emailing the content out to your subscriber list.
