Your website could be the most beautiful looking site of all time on the outside, easy to use well designed, and plenty of great engaging content, but how does it look on the inside? All of those things are important to your dealership’s Automotive search engine optimization but sometimes what’s going on behind the scenes can have just as big of an impact. The way your site has been constructed, or coded may not make your site look any better or worse but it can potentially harm your SEO efforts.
It’s important to remember that when Google “crawls” your site they don’t come in with a team of designers and scrutinize every margin and make sure things are centered and lined up properly. Crawling is done by robots that can read nothing but the bare HTML of your site, they don’t even see the styling. It’s important every now and then to take a look at your site from the search engines perspective and conduct a technical audit.
A technical SEO audit can be done pretty easily even if you don’t have a lot of knowledge about how the HTML coding or the “back end” of the site works. There is software which will imitate a search engine crawling your site and point out to you any mistakes or oversights that can potentially harm your SEO. Usually search engines prefer sites that are coded comprehensively and thoroughly, with unique meta information for each page. No duplicate pages, even if the content is different if the meta description, page title and, and all of your SEO fields are the same you’re in danger of being considered “black hat.” If you do have duplicate pages it would be wise to have a developer 301 redirect the duplicate.
Technical SEO issues can be a reminder of how important good web development can be, messy code not only makes it difficult to make changes but it can confuse the search engines and negatively effect your SEO. It’s also important with a technical audit to be able to distinguish what problems it comes up with are important priorities and which are relatively insignificant. Always remember though that as important as the structure of your site may be the most important part will always be the user experience.
Need help running a technical SEO audit for your site? Wikimotive can help, we’ll run a technical SEO audit for you free of charge, and offer you valuable advice on how you can improve. Contact Wikimotive for more information.