Do you manage your car dealership? Is reaching out to your potential customers proving to be a challenge? Do you need a solution that goes beyond conventional print and local TV ads? If your collective answer to these questions is a loud and clear ‘Yes’, then search engine optimization (SEO) is exactly what you need. As a super-effective mode of digital marketing, reaching out to the target audience through search engines is a highly popular way of capturing potential customers for automotive websites. For starters, this mode of marketing focuses on improving your organic search engine rankings against your related target keywords that help people find your website on the web. As a result, this practice lets you gain more exposure to people who are actively searching for automotive services, and improves your chances of converting them to paying customers. As a result, any capital you spend on improving your search engine rankings on Google provides you with more return on investment (ROI) as compared to conventional marketing methods. This is why SEO for car dealerships is often considered the number one mode of marketing for those businesses that want to make use of modern marketing strategies.
So how do automotive SEO services work? What kind of SEO agency can help you get the type of exposure you need? More importantly, how can you make sure that you are getting the most out of your SEO strategy to improve your online presence? Here, you need to understand that getting answers to all of these questions can be quite tricky. And realizing their explanations can be even trickier. But that’s what we are here for. By explaining your required answers in a super simple way, we can help you understand how exactly you can deploy SEO for car dealerships in a way that lets you drive maximum benefits from this marketing medium. To start with this practice, here is the ultimate guide on how you can optimize your website through local SEO.
The Key is Understanding Why You Are Optimizing Your Website
Before we start throwing around terms such as optimization and keywords more than a few times in every other sentence, it is essential to understand what exactly does car dealer SEO do for your website. Simply put, optimizing your site for search engines means that you are making it search engine friendly. Why is that important, you ask? Well, search engines cannot “see” a website the way human users do. This is why they need to depend on textual and structural cues that help them read through a website. This lets them understand the website’s content and what it has to offer to its target audience. As a result, they can judge whether or not the site is even relevant enough to the target keywords to qualify ranking against them.
With us so far? Good! Now let’s see how improving your site for car dealership SEO helps its online presence. Since enhancing your website lets search engines understand your website and know what it is about, they can determine if it is a relevant source that can serve as the answer to a searcher’s inquiry. For instance, if you run a car dealership in Chicago, then your most relevant keywords might be “car dealer in Chicago” or “buy a car in Chicago”. Whenever someone searches for those words, you would prefer that your site comes up at the top of search results. You can achieve this goal by optimizing your site for these keywords through automotive SEO. This makes it easier for search engines and their automated crawlers or website readers to understand why your website is relevant to search terms that are related to your niche. This results in your website getting ranked higher against related search engine inquiries. The higher you rank on a search engine results page (SERP), the better chances you have of driving potential customers to your site. It’s as simple as that. Now that you know why optimizing your website is vital to gain more exposure over the web let’s look at the SEO strategies that help you achieve this goal through the help of a credible SEO company.
Let’s Start With On-Page SEO
By implementing SEO for car dealers, you can ensure that you are improving your website’s readability for search engines. But making your website more accessible to search engines through keyword optimization is just one step of the overall SEO process. You also need to make sure that your website has some credibility through some digital marketing and content marketing activities that are performed all over the web. This is why proper automotive SEO services contain a mix of on-page and off-page SEO strategies. Optimizing your website and doing marketing activities for it ensures a holistic SEO campaign that can deliver the results that you want. To start with implementing the required actions for SEO for car dealerships, let’s take a look at what kind of on-page techniques you need to use on your website first.
Keyword Research and Content Optimization
To not only rank higher on search engine results but also to get the traffic you require, you must know exactly what kind of keywords are essential for your car dealer SEO. As explained above, putting in your location against your target services always works. But apart from that, you should also make sure that your website has its focus on mentioning your location or service area throughout the website body content and its footer content. This aspect makes sure that your website’s relevance to your target keywords as well as its service area is improved, which provides you with better results in terms of local SEO. By pairing this technique with a few off-page activities, this also helps you rank for keywords such as “car dealership near me” or “car dealers near me”, whenever these keywords are searched through a mobile device. The best way to find relevant keywords is by using the Google Keyword Planner tool, which gives you an idea of what kind of keywords you can include and what level of competition you will face on them.
For instance, the following frequently asked questions in relation to an auto dealership are also considered long-tail keywords. By using them within your website and then providing quick answers to them, you can make sure that you are giving your site a much needed boost while also being helpful to your target audience.
Example 1: What is a Dealer Principal?
A dealer principal is to an automotive dealership what a general manager is to a retail business. Their responsibilities include but are not limited to looking after the dealership’s day to day operations, managing its sales, and taking care of its communications with existing and potential customers. It is common for the owner of a car dealership to act as its dealer principal. But some dealerships also hire external dealer principals, who work as a regular employee and without an ownership stake in the business.
Example 2: What Does an Auto Broker Do?
An auto broker helps buyers find vehicles of their choice without having to go through extensive processes on their own. This is especially helpful for those who are looking for a specific car or who want to make sure that the vehicle they buy fulfills all their needs without fail. By contacting an auto broker, these buyers can enlist the help of a professional who searches for the perfect car on their behalf in order to save their time and efforts. Auto brokers charge a set fee for their services, which is discussed with the buyer beforehand.
Example 3: How Do Car Dealerships Attract Customers?
A car dealership attracts potential customers by investing into multiple marketing methods including billboards, print and electronic ads. Out of all of these methods, digital marketing has gained traction like no other medium in the past few years. It’s because these methods ensure that car dealerships are targeting the right audience and getting the most out of their investment. If you run an automotive dealership, then looking social media and SEO strategies is a very good way to start marketing your business.
Example 4: How Can I Promote My Car Business?
Promoting your automotive business is easy when you have the power of technology at your hand. By utilizing digital marketing and social media tools, you can reach out to an audience that is most likely to respond to your ads. This is possible by the various targeting methods that are allowed through digital marketing mediums such as SEO. This is why, if you run an auto dealership, it is essential that you look into car dealership SEO to get the most out of your marketing budget.
Using long-tail keywords and providing helpful answers like these examples can help you improve the relevancy of your automotive website to the search engines and target users alike.
Improve Website’s Load Time
Once you have found your relevant keywords and optimized your website’s content with them, the next step in car dealership SEO is to make sure that your site is error-free from a technical standpoint. The first thing here is to make sure that your website doesn’t have a high load time, since that can directly affect your search engine rankings. Google now takes page speed into account to make sure that the websites it is recommending to its users do not provide them with any issues. That’s why you must run the PageSpeed Insights tool by Google and make the required changes if any. This helps you improve your rankings on search engine results through your auto SEO activities. Otherwise, you can keep performing a ton of activities to receive minimal to no results against them.
Make Website Mobile Friendly and Secure
Another technical change that you need to take into account is to make your website mobile-friendly. According to research, more than half of the searches on Google now take place through mobile devices. If your site isn’t optimized for these devices, then it appears with an out of place layout, improper images or garbled text whenever a mobile user visits it. As a result, you can say goodbye to such potential customers before they have even started learning about your site. But that’s not all. Optimizing your website for mobile devices contributes to your search engine rankings as well, since Google now prefers websites that are mobile-friendly due to the usability reasons explained above. You can use Google’s Mobile-Friendly Tool to get direct suggestions and improve your website to be more in line with modern requirements. With it, yet another technical requirement is to make your site more secure by installing a Transport Layer Security (TLS) certificate on it. Also referred to by its predecessor’s name, Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), a TLS security certificate ensures that any information being submitted by your customers to your website is encrypted. This keeps your customers safe from any data security risks, alright. But this also has an effect on your general and local search rankings for SEO for car dealers. Once again, it’s because Google prefers those sites that use these security certificates and are hosted on a secure server (HTTPS). This is why you must contact your hosting provider or web developer to make your site more secure.
Give Some Attention to Off-Page SEO
Now that you are done with the most crucial activities in on-page SEO, it is time to look into off-page SEO for car dealerships. These activities are super exciting because this is where you do a large portion of your local SEO efforts. In terms of off-page activities, you should pay attention to factors such as content marketing, which is where you create high-quality content and share it on relevant platforms as well as social media channels. You should also look into creating name, address, and phone number (NAP) profiles on different platforms to enhance your business’ relevance with your target area. These activities create a network of high-quality links, which improves your website’s overall credibility to the search engines. This lets them know that your website is a relevant entity that’s doing all it can to reach out to its potential customers. Apart from these activities, you should also look into crucial factors for local search rankings that help you enhance your online presence on local keywords and search results.
Create and Optimize Your Google My Business Profile
A very crucial step in improving your local car dealer SEO is to create a Google My Business profile for your company. This profile helps you appear on local SEO results, while also improving your Google Maps rankings. This also helps your business gain a prominent place on the web by giving it a Google Knowledge Panel, which appears on the left side of search results whenever someone uses your business name as a keyword. You should not only create this profile, but also optimize it by verifying your contact details, adding your service area, uploading your photos, answering questions, and getting reviews from real customers. This is an essential factor of automotive SEO services, since it helps you improve your online presence in a very effective manner.
Focus on Improving Maps Rankings
To gain prominence on Google Maps and keywords such as “car dealers near me”, you need to make use of your Google My Business listing and improve its rankings on Google Maps searches by creating proper NAP profiles. Remember that building high-quality links via content marketing, adding captivating photos, and once again, getting correct reviews by your real customers. This helps you gain prominence in local search results quite significantly.
Get As Many Reviews As You Can
We know, we know. This is the umpteenth time that we are telling you to get more reviews. But it is because they are essential to improving your car dealership SEO. The more authentic reviews you have on your Google My Business profile, the higher chances you have of ranking in your required search results and gaining the attention of potential customers. Getting reviews only requires you to send a short URL to your customers who can then share their views about your business in a super-easy way. But this practice goes a long way in establishing your credibility to your target audience while also letting Google improve your rankings tangibly.
Get In Touch With Us Today!
This mix of strategies is a surefire way to improve SEO for car dealers. But given that it involves a lot of activities, you must seek guidance by agencies such as 51 Blocks in case you need any clarification regarding these factors. For one, this helps you ensure that you are performing all your activities while complying with Google’s guidelines. Conversely, with 51 Blocks, you can also rest assured that the activities occur by experienced professionals who know the ins and outs of digital marketing. Professionals at 51Blocks can tweak your SEO strategies if there’s a need to do so. With this in mind, don’t hesitate to reach out to us at 51Blocks for your car dealer SEO inquiries today. We will be happy to discuss your needs and help you benefit from our highly efficient yet completely ethical SEO techniques right away.
