With search engine algorithms becoming more intelligent day-by-day, dealerships must work hard on their SEO strategy for ranking better. They must use clean optimization technique at the forefront to avoid any kind of penalty from Google. Bear in mind those days of black hat SEO tactics like rich snippet markup span, link schemes, hidden text, and keyword stuffing are long gone.
If you want your car dealership to gain success, you must focus on white hat SEO techniques to improve content, ranking factors, and usability. You must also analyze bounce rates and click-through rates (CTR) to figure out what factors are directly influencing your audience. For more information, look at this guide on white hat SEO techniques for automotive businesses below:
Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)
Back in March of 2015, Google released plans of introducing its new mobile update. This puts everyone on notice that mobile was no longer “the future”, but to be used in strategies for the “present”. As soon as the algorithm went live, numerous sites that ranked higher were positioned lower and vice versa. This big upheaval resulted in many giving Google’s new mobile update the nickname “Mobilegeddon”.
This meant that those who didn’t participate in creating a mobile site would soon be paying the price. For 2017, Google now looks forward on seeing more Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP). AMP involves AMP HTML, which enables webmasters to enhance the user-friendliness and quality of their web pages, particularly benefiting mobile users. If you want your dealership to rank better, work hard on creating an Accelerate Mobile Page of your website.
Not only will this give you a competitive edge in the marketplace, but it will also boost the rankings of your website. With your website pages relating to latest car news, events, technologies, features, and make/model reviews opening faster, you can feel assured to grab the attention of first-time visitors easily. This will give you a boost in web traffic and sales and conversions.
Focus on User Experience (UX)
Google is always encouraging website developers and webmasters to shift their primary focus to only providing the user a great experience. While there are plenty of elements your dealership has to follow for ranking better on Google, nothing can drive better results than creating a remarkable user-experience that generates traffic. If your site is able to grab the attention of users and receives more traffic, Google will notice it.
The search engine giant’s algorithms are getting “smarter” on a daily basis. This means, your focus should only be to optimize the best user-experience and that in itself will result in better rankings. You must be aware that good UX goes much deeper than writing clean code. You need to look for all ways in which you can improve your car customers’ satisfaction. You must generate loyalty through easy-of-use and pleasure provided in the interaction with your website.
Consider your dealership website as your product. You must sell this product by figuring out your target audiences’ intent, and then develop a methodology that focuses on those metrics. This methodology should evoke a positive emotion in your customers and prospects. The easier you make things for your customers, the better chances of your automotive business ranking improving on Google!
Keyword Research
Don’t even think for a second that keyword research isn’t important for your overall SEO strategy. Although Google is now providing less info on KW, you can always use Ahrefs and Moz for improving your keyword strategy and position your dealership higher than your competition. Also, follow the latest updates from RankBrain to figure how Google is using KW for ranking. At its core, RankBrain is a machine-learning algorithm that allows Google to put things in context rather than relying on Metadata.
This means, Google is now beginning to understand language nuances like answers, stemming, and synonyms. Considering this, make sure that your dealership is developing content that incorporates a series of contextually relevant key phrases. Just be smart about what you use and how you use it. Avoid the temptation of stuffing every variation of phrase found in your research. Include only the ones you think are accurate and relevant to your content.
Content Marketing Plan
Content is listed as one of the most important ranking factors of Google. Therefore, it is imperative that you keep it relevant and include only the highest quality of expertise and knowledge on the subject matter. For instance, if you are writing a review on a car, don’t just copy the same stuff you find on other websites. Position yourself as an industry expert by actually testing the car out and listing all the key factors you found appealing or not.
If you can cover these elements with a passionate outlook on your industry, there’s no doubt your content will surpass the competition and help position you higher. Also, avoid adding fluff or any sort irrelevant information. Google’s algorithms and humans can quickly spot thin content. If you are hiring editors and writers, make sure they have a certain amount of experience in automotive content writing. Nothing can make your website look stale than redundant information.
Link Building
Regardless of what most people will tell you, link building is still an important factor for ranking well on Google’s SERPs. Yes, a day may come when links will be less vital for ranking, but it definitely isn’t today. So, for 2017 – you’re really doing yourself a disservice, if you’re ignoring this important aspect of ranking better on search engines.
Focus on getting the right kind of links that are in relevance to the content being posted on your site. This can be done by building a resource center. The primary goal of a resource center is to work with just about any kind of website. Not only does it help in attracting quality and trustworthy links, but it also helps other websites link to you. This can prove incredibly useful in boosting your SERP rankings.
The bottom line is that if you want your dealership to achieve great success, you don’t have to focus on 200 ranking signals. All you have to do is focus on the abovementioned areas and you will double the amount of traffic coming to your automotive website.
