An automotive SEO campaign can help drive more traffic to your website and hopefully to your dealership’s sales floor.
The ultimate goal of any search engine optimization campaign should not just be to send more people to your website, but to actually get those people to come into your dealership and to make a purchase.
You already know important it can be and why you should do it: here’s how to get started if you are just now kicking off your automotive SEO campaign:
Get an Idea of Where You Are
Do you know where your website stands right now?
Do you know what your page ranking is?
Do you know how much web traffic you are getting?
Before you start making any changes to your website, it is important to know what your website’s status is.
As soon as you know what that is, then you can formulate a plan based on where you are and where you want to go.
Start by getting an idea of your page ranking by using Alexa or Google toolbar.
Both of these tools will show you where in the search results you currently show up.
Log this page ranking (you can also find tools that will allow you to log this information) and analyze where your traffic is coming from.
All of this information will give you a good idea of what you need to improve as you start planning the goals for your automotive SEO campaign.
Decide Where You Want to Be
Many people will tell their web developers or SEO experts that they want to be on the first page of Google.
While this is not exactly a bad goal, the first page of Google is actually a small part of a larger goal: getting more page traffic.
You can get plenty of page traffic and you can bring in all the customers that your dealership needs without being on the first page of Google.
Defining your goals, based on where you are, can help you decide what changes need to be made.
In order to help you define your goals, answer these two questions:
- Why do you want to be on the first page of Google?
- Why is your dealership’s webpage not on the first page of Google?
Ideally, your answers should be “Because we want to attract more customers to your sales floor,” and “Because we have not yet optimized our website,” followed by specifics.
Wanting to attract more customers to your sales floor is a good answer because it demonstrates that you understand your content should be customer-centric.
Identifying the reasons that your website is not yet where you want it to be will show you want changes need to be made in order to get where you want to be.
Choose Your Keywords Wisely
You only have so many opportunities to use keywords before your website starts to become overrun with them.
For your website’s content, it’s wise to choose just a few keywords and to implement them strategically.
Also, gather a list of keywords that are perhaps less specific, but still relevant to your business. These will be keywords that you can use in blog posts.
They will still help to boost your SEO, but they will not distract from more specific or directed keywords on your website.
Pick keywords that are relevant to your customers.
In short, choose keywords that they are likely to search when looking for dealerships.
This will include location-specific keywords, as well as keywords about general model-types, like sedans and SUVs, not just about the models that your brand offers.
Keywords are becoming more and more conversational, with fewer and fewer searchers using condensed search terms like us of older generations were taught to do in school.
If you are choosing keywords for your dealership, keep keyword trends in mind.
A searcher today is far more likely to look for “what kind of Ford is best for me” than “Ford dealership New Jersey.”
Start with Website Content
Once you know the current state of your website, what you want to achieve, and what keywords you want to use in order to achieve it, it is time to start actually implementing those keywords.
The first and best place to start is with your website.
Even if you already have content on your website, it might not contain your keywords or be as useful or accessible as it should be.
Do a brief review of your content and determine what needs to be updated.
Then, start updating old content and adding new content to your page.
If you list specific vehicles on your webpage, use each vehicle’s page to write a little bit about that model and what sets it apart from the others.
The more information your website can provide about the cars you have on your lot, the more likely a customer is to actually visit your lot.
Plus, this content is an opportunity to incorporate keywords.
Move on to Blogs
Blogs are a great way to draw attention to your dealership, to keep your website’s content fresh, and to expand your use of keywords without keyword stuffing.
Once all of the content on your website is optimized (including images, videos, meta data, etc.), it’s time to move on to starting and keeping up with your blog.
While these steps do not completely cover every aspect of automotive SEO, these do cover the basics.
If you have these bases covered, you are ready to move on to some of the more complicated and time-intensive tasks.
