SEO for Car Dealers
Search Engine Optimisation is a key part of digital marketing to ensure your website remains visible to potential customers in the search results. Even if you are running paid advertising, it’s important to invest in building up some organic presence at the same time
What is SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)
Search Engine Optimisation, or SEO for short, is an integral part of driving traffic to your website and it certainly isn’t a quick process. SEO is an investment in your branding and visibility, giving Google a reason to rank your website above your competition. It involves ongoing website and content optimisation in order to give users a great experience when they visit your site.
There are quite a few moving parts when it comes to optimising your website for search engines, with content and backlinks being the most important ranking factors, but it’s also important to have your site structure in good working order to improve your user experience.
Why should car dealers invest in SEO
Investing in SEO is investing in your website and ultimately your business. If you think about it from your own experience, when you need to hire a professional, where is the first place you go? Do you reach for the phone book, do you go on the hunt for that leaflet that was posted through your door, or do you go straight to Google?
It is estimated that there are over 3.5 billion searches per day on Google, meaning there is no better time to ramp up your digital presence.
1. Build Brand Awareness
When dealers use aggregators to list their cars, they are taking advantage of an already established platform, but what happens if that platform suddenly shuts down or prices become exorbitant?
Building your own brand should be the forefront of any dealerships marketing strategy, ensuring that customers know you before they begin the search for their next car.
When a dealership builds a brand, they build credibility alongside it. They build trust as well as a catalogue of customer reviews and testimonials which help potential customers with their next purchase.
2. Monitor Results
When dealers run their own SEO activity, or have an agency do it for them, the results are trackable as everything is digital. There are a number of tools to help you track your SEO performance, with Google Analytics being the favoured one.
Not only can you see how many visitors visit your website organically, but also how many conversions this activity yielded.
Traditional marketing is much harder to track, especially Radio or TV campaigns so return on investment can often be a guessing game.
3. Reduce 3rd Party Spend
When your SEO is strong, there is less need to rely on 3rd party aggregator sites to display your stock. As your rankings improve and your visibility increases, you may be able to rely less heavily on expensive aggregator websites.
How can SEO benefit car
dealers
Car dealers are all competing for the share of the market, particularly within their local area. Used car aggregators in particular can become incredibly costly so it’s important to have a backup should you want to reduce your outgoing costs.
By building up the organic presence of your car dealer website, you can eventually reduce the amount of investment in other areas, such as paid advertising.
How Autoweb Design can help car dealers with SEO
Coolmedia are experts in the automotive industry, so we know what works and what doesn’t when it comes to car dealer SEO.
We have access to valuable third party tools that can analyse market trends, keyword volumes and competitor performance.
If your website isn’t performing as well as you expected, it could be that your visibility on search engines needs improvement. Get in touch below for a dedicated SEO proposal.
What you can expect from our SEO services
We will produce an SEO strategy dedicated to your business and your goals which will be discussed with you each month during a marketing call. We work with a range of car dealers and know what works and what doesn’t when it comes to car dealer search engine optimisation.
Content Optimisation
Content is king when it comes to SEO. Without content, where are you sending your users and how is Google going to rank you? Content should be created to adhere to SEO best practices which is something we do everyday.
Technical SEO
There are quite a few moving parts involved in ranking a website, with quite a few of these being in the back end. Meta descriptions and page titles have a direct effect on click-through-rate and also help Google understand your content better.
Link Building
If you are looking to improve the authority of your website, backlinks from high domain authority websites are the best way to do this. We can source credible opportunities for you that could help improve your authority and visibility.
Local SEO
If you are looking to target your local geographical area, there are specific local SEO strategies and best practices involved. Because we work with car dealers day in, day out, we understand the importance of local SEO.
Google my Business
If you have an existing Google my Business listing, we will optimise this for you so it has much better chance of ranking for relevant keywords in your local area.
Site Audits
Whilst optimising your content, it's important to know how your website is running. We do regular technical audits on your website to ensure everything is running smoothly and nothing will hinder our SEO efforts.
Want to know more about SEO
SEO works by ensuring a website is optimised for search engines. This means that content must be strong, the correct structure must be in place and keywords that are searched for must be present in content. One of the mistakes businesses make is to negate keyword research from their strategy and instead write content that has no SEO benefit. As well as on-page optimisations, there are a number of off-page tactics that should be applied to improve the domain authority of a website.
If your business targets a specific geographical area, you will need to consider local SEO. The notion is quite simple, it’s all about optimising your website for your local area, ensuring you are ranking for relevant search terms in your area.
You can run your own SEO activity yourself and we do provide a range of helpful and educational content to help get you started, but it’s important to know that you can’t just dabble in SEO, you need to invest regularly. The third party tools that we use here at Autoweb are also recommended and come at an additional cost.
If you are low on resource or don’t have the time to dedicate, it will be more efficient to work with the digital marketing specialists here at Autoweb.
Whilst expecting more traffic from your SEO activity might seem the logical goal overall, it’s actually got much more to do with the relevancy of the traffic. The key with the SEO activities is to drive more relevant traffic that is likely to convert rather than thousands of visitors that aren’t looking for your product or service.