How can you tell if you are doing automotive SEO correctly?
While even the wrong techniques for you will give you a short lived bump in rankings, if you want sustainable, functional search engine optimization for your dealership’s website, you want to be choosing only the best tactics for you.
How can you make sure that you are doing automotive SEO the right way?
Here are a few questions you should ask yourself:
1. Am I getting professional help?
Not everyone needs to hire an automotive SEO agency to take over their entire campaign, but it is one of the most foolproof ways to make sure that you get a strategy that is actually going to be effective.
Most dealerships do want some sort of professional to help them at the very least get their strategy off the ground and working properly.
If you’re not getting at least some professional help, now is the time to actually start looking for it.
There are lots of agencies that specialize just in automotive SEO (like this on) that can help you get your strategy rolling.
2. Is my website fast enough?
Site speed is a huge component of automotive SEO and one that many dealership’s websites struggle with.
If you have lots of pictures of your vehicles and related content, your website is naturally going to be larger and therefore slower loading than other industries’ websites.
If you want your automotive SEO strategy to be effective, you need a website that loads quickly and keeps your visitors engaged. If you website takes too long to load, users are more likely to just go to one of your competitors to look for vehicles, which increases your bounce rate, which lowers your rank.
3. Is my content high quality?
So much discussion of content in the realm of automotive SEO has to do with keyword optimization than many people forget that if the content is not also high quality, it will do little to improve their ranking.
It is just as important for you to have high quality content as it is for you to have content that includes keywords.
If you are not actively trying to find a way to improve your content, both on your website itself and in all of your online presences (blogs, social media, etc.), you are not going to have the building blocks you need for automotive SEO to work correctly.
4. Are my links high quality?
Most people, when answering this question, would say that they do not know.
Backlinks are one of the most important aspects of automotive SEO and one of the best ways to get yourself on the first page of search results, if your back links are actually quality.
What determines a quality link?
It needs to be a manually placed link on a website that has good authority and is relevant to your business.
If it even smells of spam, Google will likely look at it as spam and either disregard it or actually give you a penalty for having it.
5. Do we have a positive online reputation?
Do online reviews really matter to a dealership and its position in search results?
What do you see when you search the name of your dealership?
Hopefully, your website is the top result, but what else do you find, underneath your link?
You should find reviews praising you, posts praising your professionalism and customer service.
The nature of your online reputation matters, especially when it comes to local search results.
Search engines only want to provide their searchers with the highest quality results.
If you have a negative online reputation, you are not a high quality, valuable result.
6. What are my goals for SEO?
If your goal is simply to get more people to your website, you do not have the right goal for your strategy.
This goal is perfectly fine for people whose profits rely only on having a great deal of web traffic, but your profits rely on getting people to come to your showroom to purchase a vehicle.
Your automotive SEO should be instrumental in doing exactly that.
Viewing your strategy through this lens should allow you to pick better keywords and implement a plan for getting people to actually leave their homes and come to your showroom.
Make sure that you have the right goal for your plan before you actually implement that plan and you will have a much, much more successful plan.
7. Am I paying attention to trends and changes in automotive SEO?
SEO is constantly changing. While a strategy formulated six months ago is probably still going to be effective, one created two years ago is not.
The change is gradual, but it is enough that what worked two years ago is not going to be as effective today.
You have to actually be paying attention to what is going on, what is changing in automotive SEO if you want to get to and then stay at the head of the pack.
8. Does my website work for mobile searchers?
Most of the time, when someone is looking for you on a mobile device, it is because they are already out, shopping for cars, and the want to see what you have and find your address so they can stop by and do a test drive.
If your website is not responsive and does not cater to the mobile user, you will not be able to reach out to those users, and Google will take notice and demote your website.
