If you already have an automotive SEO campaign in place and you are not seeing the results you want to see, you might be looking for ways to make your campaign more effective.
What strategies are you using?
Are you using the right ones for vehicle dealerships?
What works for some dealerships is not going to work for others, which is why it is so important for you to work with a dedicated SEO company that understands the needs and challenges of your industry and how to customize a plan specifically for you.
Whether you are working with a company or whether you are doing all of your search engine optimization yourself, here are a few ways to make your automotive SEO more competitive and effective:
Focus on Engagement
When writing content for your campaign, are you spending more time trying to figure out ways to incorporate your keywords or are you spending more time trying to write engaging content that your target audience is likely to enjoy.
Who exactly is your target audience?
If you are like most dealerships, your target audience is people in your area who are interested in cars and who are considering buying cars.
This audience may very slightly depending on your brand.
Some brands appeal more to adventurous types while others appeal more to suburbanites.
Are you writing content hat is going to appeal to whoever you are trying to engage with?
Why does engagement matter so much when it comes to SEO?
Because search engines only want to present the people using their platforms with the very best content.
They don’t want to provide them just with the content that uses the keywords, they want the most informative content.
This means that knowing who your audience is and writing about topics and in a way that will interest them is vitally important.
If you are not writing your content in an attempt to engage with the people that you eventually want to come to your dealership and buy a car from you, you are going to have a SEO campaign that ultimately fails.
Pay More Attention to Conversions
While SEO’s primary focus is to get people to come to your website, it will not be as effective as it could be if you are not also crafting a campaign that is designed to drive conversions.
For most dealerships, a conversion is getting someone on their showroom floor to look at vehicles.
Are you doing this effectively?
Does the content on your website and blog play both roles?
Does it both get people to your website and then also encourage them to come down to your lot?
There are two different ways that your content can be more conversion-driven.
The first is to write content that actually tells people to come to your dealership.
A line that says, “Come see us today!” can be an effective way to implant the idea of visiting your dealership into the mind of the buyer.
The second is to simply create great content that is deeply concerned with providing only the best and most useful information to your readers.
Why?
Because this type of content builds your reputation.
If a buyer is looking for information about a specific model and they find that information on your blog, along with a lot of other great information, your dealership will automatically look much more promising than a dealership that hasn’t provided the searcher with that information.
The more reliable and knowledgeable you appear, the more likely someone is to come to your dealership and buy from you, instead of visiting one of your competitors.
You shouldn’t be so focused on getting people to visit your website that you forget that the content that you write is ultimately going to be read by someone and that it will dictate not only whether or not that person stays on your website, but also whether or not they decide to buy a vehicle from you.
Write Better Titles and Descriptions
Better titles for your content and better descriptions for that content are going to encourage more people to click on your content, in addition to helping you to rank higher in the search results.
Keep in mind that on Google, you only have about sixty characters to use in your headline.
While the search engine has been toying with widening how their search results are displayed, right now, this is your limit if you want your entire title to be visible, which is a good way to get people to click on your link.
A better description will encourage more people to click on your link, too.
It should accurately describe what the reader is likely to find if they click on that link, they should be completely unique, and they should be short and to the point.
Keep Your Design Clean
Does design really impact SEO?
Clean design is actually easier for search engines to crawl than messy or complicated design.
And while the design of your website might not have very much to do with whether or not someone clicks on your link in the search results (because they haven’t seen that design yet), it is a huge factor in whether or not someone stays on your website, which does fundamentally affect your search engine optimization and your website’s efficacy.
The better your design is, the cleaner it is, the easier it is to navigate, the better it will be, not just for your SEO, but for your users, which should be your biggest concern.