Search engine optimization (SEO) is essential when it comes to generating online traffic to your dealership’s website. While it is quite a complex undertaking, there are a couple of general actions that you can take, or make sure your provider is taking, to best optimize for search. There are hundreds of factors that go into ranking, but with these couple of actions, you can make a significant difference in how your website performs. We are going to share those with you today. So with that, here are three essential practices for effective automotive SEO.
#1 Meaningful SEO Content
One of the most important pieces to automotive SEO is having meaningful content on your website. Search engines exist in order to provide answers to queries provided by users. Therefore, to rank well on the search engine results page (SERP), you need to have the best answer to the question being posed. While in the past it was possible to trick the system by stuffing keywords and locations into your content, the algorithm is much more complex these days, requiring more in-depth, human experience focused content if you want to rank.
How do you know what to write or what questions are being asked most often, though? That’s where the research portion of content comes into play. Sure, you can choose to write content about what you are personally interested in; however, that does not mean people are searching for or will want to read it. Tools like SEMRush and Mangools can help you find keywords people ARE searching for, allowing you to craft your content around highly-searched topics. By becoming the authoritative answer for popular search queries, you will then generate more traffic to your website.
With that all said, simply bringing users to your website is not going to bring you business. Content marketing is where it all begins, but you will need to encourage those who click on your site to continue further towards conversion, such as on your Contact Us, Schedule Service, and Vehicle Display pages. Of course, this becomes more likely when users find your content useful; however, there are ways to encourage said movement through the site even more, such as internal linking.
#2 Internal Linking on Your Dealership’s Site
Within your meaningful SEO content, you should have relevant internal links that lead further into the research or conversion stages. If you mention a certain model within a blog post, you should link to a page with more information about that model. From the model information page, you can then link to your inventory. This type of funneling helps users learn more about the topics they are interested in and move toward conversion, and helps search engines understand the relationship between each page.
It is important to note that when you are creating internal links in your content, the anchor text, or the text that has the link attached to it, plays a role in effectiveness as well. The power of internal linking is similar to that of content marketing; it needs to make sense in order to function the way you want it to. The anchor text needs to be relevant to the page the link is directed toward. Internal linking is a huge part of impactful technical SEO, as it joins your pages together in a way that works for both humans and search engines, making it one of the essential elements to include on your automotive website.
#3 User-Friendly Pages
If your website is not user-friendly, it will not rank well on the search engine results page. But how do you know if your website is best optimized for its visitors? The easiest way is to try and use it yourself. Are pages on your site taking a long time to load? Are the buttons moving around on the screen as you try to click on them? Is your website lacking functionality when you switch from a computer to a mobile device? All of these things are undeniably frustrating when trying to navigate a website and will contribute to a lot of lost customers along with poor ranking.
It is quite easy to see when your website is loading improperly and causing issues with usability, but how do you really know exactly how bad it is? Luckily, there are tools for that. Within Google Search Console, for example, the PageSpeed Insights tool will give you a breakdown of your website’s Core Web Vitals –– Google’s measurements of user friendliness for both mobile and desktop devices. These scores show where a specific page on your website can be improved in terms of loading, shifting elements, and general functionality, as well as how much room for improvement there is at that time. This is important to keep track of, as having a user-friendly website will keep potential customers on the site for longer and help you rank better on the SERP.
Learn More About Automotive SEO With Wikimotive
Automotive SEO can be complicated at times; however, it is vital to keep up with at least the basics. Meaningful content, internal linking, and user-friendliness are all ranking factors that impact how long a user will stay on your website, which directly correlates with how likely they are to become a viable customer for your dealership.
Do you still have questions or want to partner with someone who knows the ins and outs of all things automotive SEO? Contact us at Wikimotive today to learn more about the essential practices and how we can help you achieve online success.