Automotive SEO

A key strategy to being relevant in the auto industry is your automotive SEO. The right SEO marketing can aid your website ranking.

SEO is Search Engine Optimization and there’s much more to it than simply using and paying for the right keywords to bring your website to the top of the first page. Let’s take a look at some of the best practices for your dealership.

SEO is More than a Straightforward Process

Your automotive SEO can be described as an art and a science because of the dynamic way it works online to make sure you rank higher. There’s no cut and dried way to bring your name to the top. Some keywords will help you rank up at the top, other times, it will be your links, the page authority, or the activity on your website that will help you rank where you desire online.

How Does Your Technical Automotive SEO Look?

We often think of SEO as only being the content created when using keywords, but there’s a lot more to it than that. You need to perform a technical SEO audit on your site to ensure it’s optimized for all users and for search engines. The more pages you have, the more you need to be aware of how easy it is for the bots on search engines to crawl across your links and rank them where they need to be.

According to Dealer Inspire, here are some of the things you need to look for to review the technical health of your website:

• Broken links –This is a review to ensure all links work right without returning an error message

• Redirect Chains –You might need to clear older redirect links that often slow down your website and make it hard to use

• Duplication of Titles –The Title tags and meta descriptions should be unique to every page

• Clean the XML Sitemap –The XML sitemap of your website should not nave pages that redirect, have not been indexed, or have broken links

• Internal Links –Ensure there are links included in your pages with extensions to other related pages on your site

• The Right Index Directives –Ensure the robots.txt file is in place to tell the search engine crawlers where to go.

• Alt-Image Text –the alternative text/title of an image is important for SEO and for users that have a screen reader.

Your Automotive SEO Needs to Be Relevant

The content of your pages is important, but how relevant the content is to the needs of your site visitors is more important than the use of keywords on your pages. Does your content solve a problem for your visitors? Can a potential customer see the specifications of vehicles on your blogs and learn how a vehicle can fit into their lifestyle? The content you create needs to be useful, not just informative.

Keywords Need to Appear Naturally in Your Content

The days of keyword stuffing are long gone and the content that’s included in your pages needs to be more organic and flow properly. You want your pages to become authoritative with regards to the vehicles and services you offer. Keywords are still important, but you don’t need them as often as before but you do want to make sure variations of the keywords are included in your content to bring more authority to your pages.

Local Search is a Priority for Your Automotive SEO

Is the content used on your pages focused on the area you serve? As a car dealership, your reach is only so far and you need to make sure that area is where you’re found most easily. This could mean adding the city and state to some of the content, ensuring your website uses tools that target your location geographically, and highlighting local events and concerns in your blogs.

Develop the automotive SEO that effectively highlights the local area while showcasing the vehicles that you sell as well. Your content might start out simply speaking about the vehicles you offer but need to include invitations to customers to visit your location to learn more about the models you sell.

Spend Some Time Completing the Google My Business Page

A complete Google My Business page is one of the strongest tools for your automotive SEO to make sure your dealership shows up when searched for. Spend some time with your digital team and let them assist you in completing this page to make sure your local customers see you and learn more about you online.