Of the three major search engine ranking factors, social signals are by for the least utilized in the automotive industry. Since 2010, Google has been utilizing social signals as a verified component of their algorithm, yet so many automotive SEO firms and website providers completely ignore it.
What’s worse is that many of the claim that they do it, but the efforts are automated. Let’s make one thing clear. There is no possible way to have a powerful and effective social signal strategy through automation. In fact, when Google and Bing identify an automated strategy in action (and believe me, they’ll catch them), the results can be devastating. It’s not like a link scheme, website content manipulation, or other blackhat techniques that Google deals with directly. You can get hit with a social signals penalty and never know about it.
Search engine optimization professionals and firms inside and outside of the automotive industry recognized for the first time in 2013 that social signals were the most important factor in achieving rankings. The reason is simple. Between website content, inbound links, and social signals, the last is the easiest for Google to monitor appropriately and through a lens of sincerity. There are link building campaigns that they’re busting every day. There are onsite content plays that they’ve been going after for years. With social signals, it’s just too hard to fake.
That’s the reason that the vast majority of digital marketing firms in the automotive industry do not mess with social signals. They can’t. Sure, they can put buttons on all of the pages. They can set up some sock puppet accounts and have them auto-post. It doesn’t work. Social signals do not scale. If it doesn’t scale, they don’t want to mess around with it.
Thankfully, we’re a premium digital agency that has no scalability problems. We don’t want to get big. We want our nice collection of extremely aggressive dealers that want nothing short of absolute domination on search. We’re not asking too much.
If you’re one of those dealers, please contact us. We should talk:
This post may contain affiliate links. Meaning a commission is given should you decide to make a purchase through these links, at no cost to you. All products shown are researched and tested to give an accurate review for you.