This is vital reading for any dealer considering bringing SEO content in-house—or wondering why publishing more content hasn’t produced better results.

A dealership’s content program involves far more than filling a publishing calendar. Every piece begins with a decision about what the dealership needs to accomplish and what a shopper needs to know. Research, writing, and editing then have to turn that decision into something useful.

In a recent article for Wikimotive’s newsletter Kelsea Filleul, Wikimotive’s Content Production Manager, discussed how much work sits behind a single piece of content—and how much more it takes to do that work consistently. Her perspective comes from managing that process across dealership websites. In this installment of Q&A | The Wiki Way, we’re following up with Kelsea to explore the judgment behind the work: which topics deserve attention, what makes content genuinely helpful, and where an editor can see what a writer may miss.

When a dealer wants more content on their website, what should they share about their business before commissioning another batch of pages?

This is a subjective question because “more content” can mean very different things depending on the dealer’s goals. Before deciding what content makes sense, I primarily need to understand their current business priorities. Are they trying to sell more new vehicles, move used inventory, increase leasing, grow their service department, or focus on a particular model? They may want additional visibility for a high-volume or high-value model like the Silverado 1500, or they may have inventory that has been difficult to move and needs more support.

Once I understand that priority, I can translate it into a content strategy and identify where additional content would actually be useful. There are plenty of opportunities to assign thousands of words of content, but the goal should be making sure those assignments support what the dealer is trying to accomplish rather than simply producing more pages for the sake of having more content.

If the priority is more dealership-focused and they want content that sells the business itself as a great place to shop, I need more information directly from the client. Details about the dealership’s history, value propositions, customer experience, programs, motto, community involvement, and team can all help us create content that is specific to that dealer. The more we understand what genuinely differentiates the business, the better we can communicate those differences instead of relying on generic dealership language that could apply to anyone.

Dealer Takeaway: Name the business priority first: a model, used inventory, leasing, service, or the dealership itself. Give your writer, or content team, real details about the store so the content can support that priority.

What separates a topic that matters to the dealership from a topic that will actually matter to a shopper? Where do those interests meet?

This answer is also subjective because what matters to a shopper can vary significantly from one dealership and market to another.

A dealership understands its customers better than I do from the outside. I’m not there talking to the people walking into the showroom every day, so I will always defer to the client when they tell us something is a priority for their shoppers. Do their customers predominantly lease? Do they tend to finance or pay cash? Is the dealership serving an area with particular income levels, lifestyles, driving needs, or vehicle preferences? That information helps me understand the audience and direct our content toward the needs the client is actually seeing.

Where things can become misaligned is when we move from what shoppers need to what the dealership wants shoppers to buy. A dealer may have a business reason for wanting to move a particular type of inventory, but that doesn’t necessarily mean there is shopper demand for it. I can create content around used SUVs until I’ve completely run out of angles, but that content alone isn’t going to make shoppers buy those SUVs if the market conditions, pricing, inventory, or customer needs don’t align.

The interests meet when we can connect a real dealership priority with an actual shopper need. If a dealer wants to sell more used SUVs and its customers are actively looking for affordable family vehicles, AWD options, or additional cargo space, there is a natural connection we can build content around. My role is to find that overlap and make sure we’re not just writing about what the dealership wants to sell, but giving shoppers useful information about something they have a reason to care about.

Dealer Takeaway: Look for the overlap between what the store needs to sell and what local shoppers need. Content can explain a relevant option; it cannot create demand by itself.

When several dealers in the same market sell the same models, what can one dealership share with its content team to show shoppers why it’s worth choosing?

This is probably the easiest answer for me, although it may not always be the easiest answer for the client: What do you have that your competitor doesn’t?

If several dealerships in the same market sell the exact same model, I can’t make the vehicle itself unique to one of them. The differentiation has to come from the dealership. Does the client have more personable and knowledgeable staff? Better value propositions? More competitive pricing? A different buying process? Long-standing ties to the community? Programs or benefits that shoppers genuinely won’t get from the dealer down the road?

The client has to look inward and identify what actually makes their business different. Generic claims about having great service, a large selection, or caring about customers aren’t particularly useful when every dealership can say the same thing.

If a client can give me those genuine differentiators, I can build them into the content. At that point, I’m not just creating another page about the same vehicle every other dealer sells. I’m creating content that explains why a shopper interested in that vehicle should also consider buying it from this particular dealership. The vehicle may get the shopper to the page, but the dealership’s actual value propositions give us a reason to sell the business alongside it.

Dealer Takeaway: Identify specific, supportable differences in the buying experience, people, programs, pricing, or community presence. Replace claims any nearby dealer could make with facts about your store.

What does a dealer know about its customers that a writer researching the market online is likely to miss?

I actually have the perfect example for this. I am not shopping at your dealership, unless you happen to be selling in Southern New Hampshire. I can research and research to understand the typical buyer for a particular model, what questions shoppers are asking, what features matter to them, and what makes sense for the geography and market surrounding a dealership. That gives me a very strong starting point.

What search research cannot always tell me is what is happening on the ground at that specific dealership.

We ran into this with Ford Bronco content for a Southern California client. The Bronco is an open-air adventure vehicle. My experience, my research, and Ford’s own branding all pointed toward off-roading and outdoor recreation as obvious angles for the content. The client kindly reached out and essentially said, “Hey, we don’t really have anywhere near us to go off-roading. Our customers are buying Broncos as status symbols or because they want an open-air vehicle for cruising along the coast.”

Fair enough. That’s information I wouldn’t necessarily discover through search research because search data can show me broader interests, questions, and patterns, but it can’t put me in the showroom listening to that dealer’s customers.

That’s where client knowledge becomes incredibly valuable. Research can help me understand what a shopper might be asking and give us evidence for how to approach a topic, but it isn’t a substitute for the dealership’s firsthand understanding of its own buyers. The strongest content comes when we can combine the two.

Dealer Takeaway: Tell your content team what shoppers actually ask, why they choose certain vehicles, and where their expectations differ from common assumptions about your market. Those firsthand details can change the direction of a piece, as they did in Kelsea’s Bronco example.

How can a dealer tell whether a page gives shoppers enough information without making them work through too much?

This is something you get a feel for over time, and fully explaining how I make that judgment would probably require a PowerPoint and a lot of reading.

At a basic level, though, I ask a few questions. Have I explained the topic enough for the reader to understand it without repeating things I’ve already said? Can the shopper actually do something with the information I’ve given them? Is there a logical next step? Have we covered the context someone would reasonably need around the topic? And, once the content is live, is it actually ranking and performing the way we intended?

A piece is too thin when it technically addresses the topic but doesn’t give the shopper enough information to understand it, make a comparison, answer their question, or decide what to do next. On the other hand, more words don’t automatically make something more useful. A piece becomes too long when we’re repeating ourselves, adding information that isn’t relevant to the shopper’s decision, or continuing to explain something after we’ve already answered the question.

The amount of explanation also depends heavily on the topic. Someone researching a vehicle comparison or trying to understand financing may need considerably more context than someone landing on a page because they’re looking for a specific model for sale nearby. The goal isn’t to reach a particular length for its own sake. It’s to give the shopper enough useful information to satisfy the reason they came to the page without making them work through unnecessary content to find it.

Dealer Takeaway: Read it with the shopper’s decision in mind. Can they understand the answer, use it, and see a sensible next step? Extra length has no value if it repeats or buries the answer.

Which people at a dealership should a content team hear from before writing about its vehicles, service, or buying experience?

I’d want to hear from anyone at the dealership who regularly talks with customers. As for what I’d want to learn from them? EVERYTHING. I want to know what your buyers are like, what they ask about, what they find important, and what concerns come up during the shopping process. I want to know what your staff is like, what makes them knowledgeable, what models they love, and what they find themselves explaining to customers over and over again.

I would absolutely love the opportunity to speak with the people who are talking directly to customers every day. Salespeople, service advisors, finance staff, and managers can all have insights into how the dealership actually operates and what its customers care about. A salesperson might know why buyers in that market consistently choose one model over another. A service advisor knows the questions owners repeatedly ask after the sale. A finance professional knows what parts of that process customers frequently misunderstand. Those are incredibly useful insights, and they often never make it onto the dealership’s website.

When I can’t talk to those people directly, I go looking for that information myself. I dig through Google reviews and Yelp reviews. Yep! I check LinkedIn. I even look at employees’ LinkedIn profiles. I’m looking for the details that tell me what this dealership is actually like beyond the standard information on its website.

I know what good content looks like, and I’m willing to dig for the information that makes it better. The more access I have to the people who understand the dealership and its customers firsthand, though, the more specific, useful, and authentic that content can become.

Dealer Takeaway: Ask salespeople, service advisors, finance staff, and managers which questions and concerns they hear repeatedly from customers. Share those insights with your content team so it can address what shoppers actually want to know.

When a draft is accurate, polished, and on brand, what else should a dealer ask before approving it?

I read it and ask: Did we actually answer the question? Then I ask: What other holes are there?

A piece can be completely accurate, grammatically clean, and well written but still leave the reader without what they came for. I look at it from the shopper’s perspective. If I searched this question and landed on this page, would I walk away with an answer, or did we spend 1,200 words talking around it?

Then I look for the questions the answer naturally creates. Did we give the shopper enough context to understand what we’re telling them? Did we make a claim that needs further explanation? Is there an obvious follow-up question we ignored? Are we assuming the reader already knows something they may not know? Can they use this information to make a decision or take a next step?

That’s what I mean by looking for holes. I’m not trying to answer every possible question someone could ever have about a topic. I’m looking at the path the content takes the reader down and making sure we haven’t left important gaps along the way.

Ultimately, polished writing isn’t the same thing as useful writing. If the shopper came with a question, the content needs to give them an answer.

Dealer Takeaway: Ask whether it answers the question that brought the shopper to the page. Check for missing context, unsupported leaps, and obvious follow-up questions.

What are the most common signs that a piece was written around a keyword rather than built to help a person?

So many things.

The biggest sign is that the content doesn’t actually answer any questions the searcher might have. The keyword may appear throughout the page, but if I finish reading and still don’t understand what the writer wanted me to learn, we haven’t really helped anyone.

For model-specific keywords, I use a very simple test. If the keyword is something like “Chevy Silverado near me,” could I replace “Chevy Silverado” with a completely different model from another brand and have the content still make sense? If I can, that’s a pretty good sign the writer didn’t research the vehicle or think seriously about why someone would be searching for it. Model-specific content should tell me something useful about that model, its buyers, or the reasons someone might choose it.

Keyword stuffing is another obvious one. If the exact keyword and every possible semantic variation are being forced into the piece over and over again, we’re writing for the keyword instead of the person. Keyword stuffing is the worst, and I don’t know why we can’t stop doing it.

Finally, I look for a takeaway or some kind of action. I’m not talking about whether there is a button on the published page. After reading the content, does the shopper know what to do with the information? Maybe they know what model fits their needs, what feature to compare, what question to ask the dealership, what inventory to explore, or what their next step should be. If the piece gives the reader nothing to do with what they just learned, what’s the point?

Good SEO content shouldn’t feel like we found a keyword and figured out how many paragraphs we could build around it. The keyword tells us something about what the person is looking for. Our job is to figure out what they actually need once they get there.

Dealer Takeaway: Try Kelsea’s substitution test: if you could swap in an unrelated model and the page still works, it likely needs more specific, useful information.

Why is an independent editor especially valuable when a team is producing content consistently? Can you describe the sort of problem a writer is unlikely to catch in their own draft?

OH BOY. There are two parts to this.
First, writers often think they’ve covered everything they intended to cover because they know what they meant to say. When you wrote the piece, you already have all of the context in your head. That can make it difficult to recognize when an explanation isn’t as clear to another reader, when you’ve skipped a logical step, when something contradicts another section, or when you haven’t actually answered the question as completely as you thought you did.
An independent editor doesn’t have that same context. They’re experiencing the content more like a reader would, which makes them much more likely to notice those gaps.
The second part is a little different. Have you ever sent a text and thought you sent one thing, only to realize you said something VERY different because you misspelled something, autocorrect took over, or your brain simply read what you intended to write instead of what was actually on the screen?
Well… let me share some of the funny typos and wording mishaps our editors have caught in recent months:
“Maintenance is as simple as can be when working with our sales technicians.”
“You deserve to have a bug variety to explore and choose from.”
“Maintenance Your Vehicle with Our Team”
“Our expats will help you find a Traverse with the technology, features, and performance that ideally suit your needs.”
“Available panoramic sun room.”
“A 6.6-foot food that provides 71.7 cu.ft. of space.”
And I haven’t even gotten into my favorite misspellings of model names. I’ve read Ford Bornco, Chevrolet Sierra, Hyndai Elantra, and many more.
Those examples are funny, but they’re also a good illustration of why independent editing matters. A writer can read their own sentence five times and continue seeing the word they intended to type. A fresh set of eyes doesn’t have that advantage or disadvantage.
When you’re producing content consistently and at scale, those small mistakes are inevitable. More importantly, so are occasional gaps in logic, clarity, organization, and usefulness. An independent editor gives you someone whose job is to read what was actually written rather than what the writer knows they meant to write.

Dealer Takeaway: Give someone fresh responsibility for checking clarity and completeness as well as errors. The writer knows what they meant; the editor reads what a shopper will actually see.

If several writers create content for a dealership, how can it remain recognizable without making every page sound the same?

Patience. Research. Talking to other people. And not getting married to one idea.
A recognizable dealership voice shouldn’t mean every piece follows the same structure, makes the same points, or uses the same phrases. The consistency should come from understanding who the dealership is, who its customers are, and how it wants to communicate with them. Writers can cover completely different subjects and still sound like they’re writing for the same business if they understand those things.
You also have to keep thinking, researching, and building your own knowledge. You have to reach out and talk to other people, whether that’s someone else in your field, people at the dealership, or even friends who give you a different perspective. There are so many things to write about and so many questions shoppers have. If you rely on the same handful of ideas every time, the content is eventually going to sound formulaic no matter how good your brand guidelines are.
If all else fails, consider the audience. Even the geography you’re targeting can change how you approach the same vehicle or subject.
I look at my own area as an example. I live in a fairly populated city with moderately decent public transportation, and parking can be a pain. I don’t necessarily need my vehicle for every trip, so I have more freedom to choose something based on comfort or other preferences, even if it isn’t the most practical choice for every situation. My dad lives only about 25 minutes away, but he’s in a small suburban town without public transportation. He and many of his neighbors tend to lean toward compact SUVs and sedans that make sense for the driving they have to do every day.
Those aren’t necessarily audiences I would speak to in exactly the same way, even though they’re geographically close to one another.
That’s how you avoid making consistency synonymous with sameness. Give writers a strong understanding of the dealership, its customers, and its voice, then give them enough room to think about the actual person they’re writing for. The dealership should remain recognizable from one piece to the next without every piece sounding like it came out of the same template.

Dealer Takeaway: Give writers a shared understanding of the dealership and its customers, then allow the subject and audience to shape each piece. Consistency should come from the store’s identity, not repeated phrasing.

As a content library grows, what tells you that an existing article deserves a fresh look? What tends to change: the shopper’s questions, the dealership’s priorities, or the information itself?

All of the above and more.

Shopper questions change. Dealership priorities change. Vehicle information changes. But the standards for what makes a good piece of content change too, both in how we write and in what search engines are looking for.

Something we wrote several years ago may still be technically accurate, but that doesn’t necessarily mean I would consider it good content today. Maybe our writing standards have improved. Maybe we’re better at understanding search intent. Maybe the dealership has given us information about its customers or business that we didn’t have when the original piece was written. Maybe the page ranks, but it isn’t answering the questions people are actually asking anymore. Performance itself can tell us that something deserves another look.

AI has shifted the game considerably too. Search behavior is changing, search engines are changing, and people have access to instant answers in a way they didn’t before. That raises the bar for content. If a page only provides generic information that someone can get from an AI summary in five seconds, we need to ask what value our page is adding.

Sometimes the information itself is what dates a piece. Models change, technology changes, dealership programs change, and the market changes. Other times, nothing in the article is technically “wrong.” We’ve simply learned enough since it was published to recognize that we could make it much more useful.

That’s why I don’t think of a content library as something you finish. Existing content should be revisited when the information, audience, dealership, search environment, performance, or our own understanding of what makes good content has changed enough that we can give the shopper a better answer than we did the first time.

Dealer Takeaway: Flag older content for review when vehicle details, dealership programs, shopper questions, or business priorities change. A page can still be accurate in places while giving shoppers an incomplete or outdated answer.

When a dealer considers hiring one writer to manage the entire content program, what work and risks should they account for beyond that person’s writing capacity?

First, how much content are you expecting that writer to create?
Take a hypothetical workload of 40 pieces at 1,000 words each per month. One strong writer could potentially produce that volume. But I would still want a good editor involved. Even an excellent writer benefits from another set of eyes, especially when they’re responsible for that much content about the same dealership, brands, models, and subjects every month.
One writer is eventually going to get stuck on certain words, phrases, structures, and ideas. Their content may become formulaic without them realizing it. That’s not necessarily a reflection of their ability. If you ask someone to write about SUVs, financing, service, used vehicles, and the same handful of models month after month, there are only so many times they can approach those subjects before they start falling back on familiar patterns.
It’s also going to get boring as hell.
That’s something I would genuinely account for. In that example, forty thousand words every month is one thing. Forty thousand words about the same dealership and many of the same automotive subjects is another. You should expect some frustration, creative fatigue, and potentially turnover if one person is carrying the entire program indefinitely.
I’d also ask who is handling everything surrounding the writing. Who decides what should be written in the first place? Who researches the market and dealership? Who makes sure vehicle information is accurate? Who reviews performance and identifies content that needs another look? Who edits the work? Who catches gaps the writer can’t see because they’re too close to the draft? And what happens to your entire content program if that writer gets sick, takes a vacation, leaves the company, or simply has a bad month?
One person may be capable of producing the required word count. That’s different from one person being able to provide all of the perspectives, quality control, research, strategy, and long-term creative energy that make a content program successful.
Fresh eyes matter. Different perspectives matter. An editor matters. And if you’re building an entire content operation around one person, you should understand the risks you’re accepting along with the efficiency.

Dealer Takeaway: Assign ownership for planning, dealership research, fact-checking, editing, and reviewing older work. Consider creative fatigue and what happens when that person is unavailable.