For your dealership to have highly-performant SEO, you need a strong content strategy. But what does that mean? Whether you’re trying to write content in-house, or simply want a better understanding of how you can hold your vendor accountable, I’m going to tell you the 3 fundamentals you should be focusing on.
To be effective for SEO, content needs to be 3 things:
- It needs to be long form
- It needs to be unique to your website, and
- It needs to be written with consumers in mind (not to “game” search engines)
So, let’s take a look at each of those, one-at-a-time.
Long-Form
Long-form content is going be 1,000+ words in length. You can perform a Google Search for “how long should my content be” and the results are going to vary. You can sit here all day reading different versions of the truth, but you’ll find a lot of results indicating it should be somewhere in the 2,000 word (or high 1,000 word) range. There is no one true answer. It’s not that Google is looking for 1,000 words specifically, it’s that you need to write at least 1,000 words to have a prayer of covering a topic in a way that’s robust enough – and answers questions effectively enough – to develop the relevancy needed to show up in search results for that topic.
Unique
The content has to be unique to your website. If it’s not, you just aren’t going to get any search relevance for it, because Google is well-aware that there’s a different source that had it first. So, all content on your site should be written from the ground up and internally – by you, or by an agency that can handle it responsibly for you.
Written for Consumers (Not Search Engines)
Now, here’s a pro-tip. We did a Google search for “2022 Honda Pilot trims” and found the ‘People Also Ask’ box common to most Google searches.
Again, it may not show up for all Google searches, but it will show up for most – and if it doesn’t show up for you, just modify your search a little bit until one pops up.
The ‘People Also Ask’ box is going to give you a bunch of questions that Google considers to be relatively synonymous to the main question (or closely related to it). You’ll initially see four additional questions…
But – if you expand one…
…then collapse it – it will add more.
If you expand another and collapse another, it will add even more.
This is actually a cheat sheet that Google gives you, showing you what kinds of topics you should cover on a landing page about the 2022 Honda Pilot, in order to be relevant for that search topic. So, if you’re wondering, “How on Earth do I write 2,000 words about the “2022 Honda Pilot”, “Honda Pilot trims”, or “Honda Pilot for sale”…the answer is simple.
Let Google give you the playbook.
Is it difficult to write 2,000 words about these different questions? It can be, but at least you have a structure to be able to form your content around.