As a dealer, you're aware that your website needs SEO. Most dealerships recognize the importance of SEO in helping their website rank higher. But they don’t always understand what SEO entails.
In fact, many dealers aren’t involved in their SEO at all. Our internal analysis of our dealership base has revealed that Dealer Spike customers in particular approach SEO in one of three ways:
- More than 50% of dealers outsource SEO to an agency, typically their website vendor
- 25% to 40% have an internal employee who wears multiple hats, including marketing
- Less than 5% have a dedicated in-house marketing expert
Considering many dealers delegate marketing responsibilities, this lack of detailed SEO understanding is, well, totally understandable. There’s way more to SEO than most people realize. It’s practically become a science of optimizing your messaging and website content to appeal to search engine algorithms and end users alike. It’s also something most dealers need help perfecting and managing, as most don’t have the time or internal resources to become full-time SEO experts.
This article will outline the business benefits of SEO and offer resources and direction to help you manage and scale your marketing. For those marketing managers and junior managers, this article will give you better insight into what SEO means for your dealership—how it works, why it requires an ongoing commitment, and most importantly, how you can optimize your website content for search engines to drive more high-quality traffic to your site.
What Is SEO?
As search engines evaluate websites, including yours, they are designed to return results and give shoppers exactly what they’re looking for. SEO is the process of improving your website to increase its visibility on search engines. It’s an ongoing effort to keep your website aligned with search engine algorithms and atop the search engine rankings. While search engines return both organic and paid results, SEO is focused only on organic results—the unpaid listings that appear on search engine results pages that are relevant to a user’s search inputs.
A well-optimized website with SEO can improve organic search results and increase the number of searches that are relevant to you. It can also improve your relevance for terms you are already ranking for to boost your search rank and earn even more clicks to your website. Best of all, because organic results are based on a specific algorithm, you can optimize your website content to direct more online traffic to your business. The more work you put in, the better results you get for your website and business.
SEO Benefits to Business
Staying relevant on search engines, like Google, is no longer just a luxury—it’s essential to business success. According to a survey conducted by the U.S. government, almost a quarter of all consumers (21%) use the internet to find local businesses on a daily basis. Thirty-five percent of consumers use the internet to find local businesses multiple times per week. Perhaps even more telling, only 1% of all consumer respondents say they don’t use the internet to look for local businesses.
What’s more, among the billions of search results returned by Google, more than a quarter of all searchers click on the first organic search result ranking, with an average click-through rate of 28.5%. That puts a lot of pressure on your SEO to drive traffic to your website. When done right, SEO can drive more web traffic to your site and deliver more qualified leads (those who are ready to make a purchase). It can give your business a huge boost as more shoppers look for businesses and buying opportunities online.
In addition to the more obvious benefits of helping you convert leads and build your business, SEO can help you build trust and credibility among consumers. It can build your brand, expand your audience and give your customers a better overall shopping experience. In an online world, it’s the best way to bring in more customers and make your business better known.
SEO Is an Ongoing Investment
Many businesses view SEO as a one-and-done process. Once they’ve achieved a good organic search ranking, their work is done, and they will automatically see a steady stream of organic traffic to their website. In reality, SEO is an ongoing investment, and dealers who pause their SEO efforts could fall behind if their competitors ramp up their own SEO efforts.
Instead of approaching your SEO strategy with a “set-it-an-forget it” mindset, create a process to routinely evaluate and optimize your website’s content – or confirm that your website or marketing agency is keeping your online presence well-optimized for organic search.
How to Improve Your Content & Organic Rankings
As you now know, SEO is a science. It’s the practice of constantly perfecting your website content to appeal to search engines and return top results for shoppers. Implement the following SEO best practices to optimize your website content for SEO.
Use Keywords
Because organic rankings are concerned with returning relevant information to users, those sites that include the right keywords and phrases—words that are actually input into search engines by end users—will rank more favorably.
Use a keyword planner to find words that users are searching for. Focus on words and phrases that aren’t being overly used by other websites, including your competitors. You can see this by checking search volume in your area for the last month.
Include relevant keywords on every webpage, but be careful not to overstuff keywords (more on that later) or use too few. Keywords are most effective when used in page headings, subheadings and the opening paragraphs of content.
Manage a Blog
A blog is a great way to communicate with your audience and include keywords in your webpages, but posting content about nothing in particular or updating your blog with content that’s not interesting or helpful to the consumer won’t improve your search rankings.
Use a blog to update your site with relevant, useful, engaging content that relates to your inventory and services. Not only will end users want to visit your site, but other similar websites may also link to your site for your site for informative content, further improving your authority and search rankings.
A blog can also create topical authority for search engines, which measures website credibility. Websites with topical authority create consistent, high-quality content that end users find helpful. Articles that are informative and in-depth, include keywords and phrases, and include relevant links to other topical authority sites will rank higher for end users.
If you’re a Dealer Spike customer, you can take advantage of our blog posting tool to create and update blog articles on your website. Click here for step-by-step instructions to using the blog tool.
Update Your Inventory & Content
Ensuring that your site stays relevant to your inventory isn’t just helpful for shoppers, it can actually optimize your site for search engines. As your inventory changes, update content on your site or communicate changes with your site vendor to reflect that you no longer offer a brand/product or that you’re adding a brand or product. On-site content should always reflect the products you carry.
When it comes to content, you don’t always have to start from scratch. You can update existing content and optimize high-value pages, including inventory pages, educational blog articles or your “About Us” page, to reflect the current consumer market and your updated offerings. This will allow you to continuously include relevant informative content on your site that will help you rank higher for SEO purposes.
Use Metadata
Metadata is concerned with the spaces in between a user’s search results and your actual webpage. Metadata includes page titles that appear at the top of the browser windows and the descriptions of webpages in search results listings. Include keywords and phrases in your metadata to inform users of your content before they reach your website and to improve search rankings.
You can also use alt tags to describe inventory photos and other images. Especially for sites that rely on images to tell their story, such as dealer websites, alt tags can describe an image for search engines in a way that returns relevant results to end users.
Alt tags can also help search engines locate your pages through images, which can be useful for text-only browsers and users that input features and other common image descriptions, including make, model, color and more.
Optimize URLs & Internal Linking
The right URL (with relevant keyword-rich anchor text that describes your destination pages) will appeal to search engine algorithms and drive users to your website. Similarly, your internal linking structure (buttons, clickable images, anchor text and hyperlinks to other pages on your website) can facilitate shopper navigation and help search engines recommend your site.
On the other hand, broken or outdated internal links can hinder search engine crawlers from properly indexing your content. This not only negatively impacts the user experience, it hurts your search rankings. Make sure your internal links always connect to pages that are relevant in terms of topic and context.
Improve the Technical Aspects of Your Site
Sometimes referred to as technical SEO, making technical improvements to your website can actually improve your search rankings. These improvements include optimizing speed and performance, ensuring a mobile-friendly and responsive design and adding rich snippets to search results. Search engines know when consumers are having a good or bad user experience and will recommend sites to other consumers accordingly.
Getting Help with SEO
It’s understandable if you don’t totally understand SEO. There’s way more to SEO than first meets the mind, and even the best and brightest business leaders rely on SEO experts to boost rankings and bring in business.
If you’re looking for a trusted expert to manage your SEO strategy, we can help. We can work with your dealership and your team to optimize your website content and avoid SEO mistakes, so you can improve your messaging for end users, appeal to search engine algorithms and drive high-quality traffic to your site.