In the first installment of ‘SEO First Steps’, we sit down with Meaghan StPeter, Wikimotive’s Director of Search, to discuss where dealers should begin: understanding the website they already have. Whether you want to read the full transcript here, or watch the conversation for yourself – we’ve got you covered.
What common mistakes do dealers make when starting SEO?
A lot of dealers, when they decide they wanna start doing SEO on their website, they’ll do things like adding lists of geos to their homepage, and I’m sure everyone’s seen it. Things like “Chevy dealer near Cincinnati, Mason, Monroe” (etc). And then they’ll also start adding internal linking all throughout their website to just pages that don’t necessarily make sense or bring a user towards conversion. These things can actually temporarily increase your rank, but eventually Google will catch on to what you’re doing and it does come off as spammy and you won’t see performance in the long run. So really, you should avoid doing those things in general, but you also shouldn’t be touching your website at all until you’ve really taken a look at it as a whole and kind of gotten a feel for where you’re at.
Dealer Takeaway: Understand your starting point. Review existing content and prior SEO work before making changes.
What should a dealer assess before making website changes?
Take a look at your site to understand the current state of things. Like, is there content on your website yet? Has technical SEO ever been done? That could be things like internal linking, meta titles, rewritten, all sorts of different technical things. Just looking to see if anyone’s ever touched it before. And you really just wanna get a feel for that before you start doing anything at all because you don’t wanna duplicate efforts or start doing things that maybe didn’t need to be done. You wanna start with a base knowledge of where you’re at right now so that you can make the best action plan for going forward.
Dealer Takeaway: Avoid shortcuts. Location lists and unnecessary internal links can create spammy content without helping shoppers.
How might a dealer start to evaluate their website?
Besides just looking at the website, the best thing to do is use a website crawler like Screaming Frog, which pretty much mimics Google or another search engine, runs through all the pages on your website and collects data about them. That could be things like broken pages, broken images, even just what images are on there. It doesn’t have to be something that’s broken. Just gives you a holistic view of every single attribute that has to do with each page, and… But you can look at it all in one place.
What red flags can a website crawl reveal?
Big red flags when you run your first crawl would be things like four o fours. That would be a broken page. So if a user was on your website, they would click to go to a page, and it leads nowhere.
There would also be things like missing Meta Titles, missing headers on your page; all of these things are important to help Google see what your page is, what it’s about, and kind of decide how it’s going to rank you for any given search term. And when those things are missing, that’s pretty important to address, and a crawl will help you identify those things pretty quickly.
Dealer Takeaway: Use a website crawler. Look for broken pages, missing meta titles, and missing headings.
Why should a dealer also their website manually?
It’s super important to click through your website just as a human being because there are things that a crawler won’t catch. But also crawlers aren’t the ones that you’re really making your website for. Right?
People are going to your website, and there are things that maybe don’t offer a good experience to them. A tool on your website could be broken, and you wouldn’t know that unless you went and used it yourself because that’s not gonna be called out in a crawl. Pictures could be loading really big on a page and taking up the whole screen. Things could be moving around during loading and kind of frustrate people as they’re trying to click on things. There are just so many issues that you wouldn’t know were there unless you personally click through. And Google will devalue you for having poor user experience on your website as well.
Dealer Takeaway: Review the site as a shopper. Test tools, images, and page loading to uncover issues a crawler may miss.
How can a dealer manage an overwhelming list of site fixes.
I think the most important thing that you have to remember when you’re looking at, whether it’s the short list or the long one, not everything has to be fixed today. There really isn’t such thing as an SEO emergency unless your whole website all of a sudden was not indexed by Google. That that could be an emergency. But there really isn’t an emergency. And if everything has sat the way that it has up until this point, everything you do from here on is actually just making your website better. And so you just need to not freak out and just make a list, prioritize the things that you can, and get them done as you’re able to.
Dealer Takeaway: Make a prioritized action plan. Understand what each fix will accomplish and tackle the most important issues first.
What 4 things should dealers remember before starting SEO.
- Don’t jump to a full redesign of your website. You probably don’t even need to do that.
- Don’t just start worrying about all the things you do and don’t rank for.
- Don’t just start fixing things all willy-nilly without really knowing what levers to pull for what impact.
- Remember that not everything has equal importance and some things are higher priority than others.
Dealer Takeaway: Don’t rush into a redesign or chase rankings. Let your website assessment guide your next steps.