With 2019 upon us, it’s time to take a look at your Automotive SEO campaign and see whether or not it is going to keep serving you well during the next year.
Google’s updates don’t always correspond with the new year, but they often do, and making sure that your automotive search engine optimization is updated for 2019 will ensure that you don’t see any drop in rankings over the next year.
Here are a few things you can do to make sure your automotive SEO is ready for 2019:
1. Take a look at your links.
Over the last year, the updates to Google’s algorithm have made the guidelines around which links will help you rank and which links will hurt your ranking.
Over the next year, Google will likely continue to adjust their regulations to punish those who use paid links or other unnatural link building techniques in order to artificially boost their rankings.
What do you need to do to keep your automotive SEO current during the next year?
Take a look at your current links and determine if any of them are what Google might deem “unnatural.”
If they are, remove them.
Continue working to build natural links through guest blogging.
2. Update your mobile website or get a responsive design.
While the mobile friendliness of your website has already been a huge factor in 2018, it is only going to become more important over the next year.
Mobile traffic is already making up more than half of all web traffic, so if you do not have a functional mobile website, Google is going to punish you.
Having a separate mobile website is a good option, but having a responsive design is an even better one, as this enables you to have a single website that works on all devices.
3. Modernize your design.
Before 2019 hits is a great time to take a look at your website and to determine whether or not it still looks modern, and therefore credible.
If your website looks like it was built in 2003 (or it actually was built in 2003), your site visitors are unlikely to think that your dealership is legitimate.
Website design has come a long way in the last fifteen years and there is nothing endearing or useful about having a “vintage” design.
It will load slowly, run slowly, and will not be pleasing to look at. In order to get people onto your page and keep them on your page, you need a modern design.
4. Kill bad content.
In the coming year, Google is going to take even greater measures to remove low quality content from their search results.
Simply having content is no longer enough.
It has to be very good content.
It has to be current, useful, and engaging.
Hitting that trifecta isn’t always easy, which is why having a freelancer ghostwrite your content is a good option.
If you don’t want to spring for a ghostwriter, you should still take some time to read over your content and make sure that it both includes the necessary keywords and is extremely useful and is at least fairly current.
Ax content that does not fit those criteria and replace it with new content.
5. Post new content.
This tip and the previous one are not necessarily mutually exclusive, but it is important to note that currency and freshness are going to be even bigger in 2019 than they were in 2018 automotive search engine optimization.
Websites who keep their content fresh (both by posting regular posts to a blog and by updating page content as necessary) will always rank above content that is old and stale.
If you do not currently maintain a regular schedule of blogging and website updates, make it a New Year’s resolution for 2019.
6. Get rid of annoying interstitial ads.
This is one of the newest things Google is pushing for 2019.
These are ads that pop up on the mobile version of your site, using up the whole screen and often having a hard-to-find close button.
They are annoying and usually result in a user backing out of your website and clicking on a different link, rather than sticking around.
Google is going to start punishing websites that use these ads because they kill user friendliness, so if your website uses these types of ads, remove them now before Google has the chance to knock you down a few ranking pegs in the new year.
7. Diversify your SEO campaign.
If you are relying too much on content and not enough on links, or too much on links and not enough on content, 2019 is going to be a hard year for your dealership’s SEO.
SEO should be like a stock portfolio or like the lineup of cars in your showroom: diversified to fit as many needs as possible.
You want to reach out to your customers where they are, not necessarily just wait for them to find you.
Banking on one SEO tactic and ignoring others means that if that tactic starts to fail, you could be in serious trouble.
Start diversifying your tactics, so if one does start to fall behind, you have the others to bolster you up.
8. Be diligent about tracking down content thieves.
When another website steals your content, it is not just bad for that website, it’s bad for yours too.
In 2019, there will be even more tools for you to use to help you track down content thieves and to punish them for scraping your content (or to simply make it impossible for them to scrape your content without automatically linking back to your page).