Over 90% of car buyers begin their buying journey online, comparing models and pricing, valuing trade-ins, and identifying dealerships. Using SEO for your automotive dealership can boost traffic, brand awareness, and in-person footfalls from interested shoppers. Automotive SEO involves refining your dealership website, Google Business Profile, social media, and online reviews to help you gain favor with search engines.
Optimize Your Website
Automotive digital marketing, for instance, getting your car dealership’s website up to date and optimized for SEO, is one of the most important things you can do. This ensures potential customers can find the information they need and helps search engines rank your site high in searches. It’s also essential to have a mobile-friendly website that can be easily viewed on smartphones, tablets, and laptops. This is important because more and more consumers are using mobile devices to research and purchase cars. If your website is not mobile-friendly, you could miss out on a lot of business.
Another thing to consider is adding a blog or news section to your website and updating it regularly. This can help you rank higher in search results and show up in local pack listings. It’s also a great way to answer common questions your customers may have. For example, if you sell SUVs, you can create a blog post about what SUVs your dealership has in stock and their features. This will help you answer common questions that your customers have and increase the chances of them choosing to work with you.
Optimize Your Social Media
Car dealerships must be present in the many intent-driven moments before people buy a vehicle. This includes browsing the internet, researching models and prices, asking questions, and comparing dealerships. Car dealerships can achieve their goals and stand out in a competitive industry with a well-planned social media marketing strategy. By optimizing social media, potential customers can easily find the necessary information. This is done by posting relevant and engaging content that entices the audience to interact with the brand. Monitoring and measuring key performance indicators (KPIs) such as follower growth, engagement rates, website traffic, leads generated, and sales attributed are also essential.
Additionally, search engine optimization (SEO) is a powerful tool that car dealerships can use to increase visibility on search engine result pages (SERPs), attract more qualified traffic, and generate more leads and sales. It involves several best practices, including onsite optimizations, local SEO initiatives, and structured data usage. A thorough automotive SEO strategy will help car dealerships improve their online visibility, gain a competitive advantage, and enhance the user experience of their websites.
Optimize Your Citations
Car dealerships are where buyers assess, test drive, and ultimately purchase their next vehicle. They’re also the businesses that search engines look to for information about car models and related services. That’s why automotive SEO is so essential for the industry. It encompasses a variety of onsite and offsite strategies that will help your dealership rank for queries that your target audience is likely to enter into search engines. To get started, you’ll need to optimize your onsite content. This means incorporating keywords into your website content in ways that will be natural and relevant. You’ll also want to optimize your online directory listings by consistently listing your business name, address, and phone number on various websites. By optimizing their websites, social media, and local listings, car dealerships can improve their visibility in search engines, gain a competitive advantage, and drive more targeted traffic to their sites. As a result, they can produce more leads and sales in their area. If you’re ready to grow your car dealership’s revenue with search marketing, contact us today for a free digital strategy consultation.
Optimize Your Local Listings
While optimizing website content and building quality backlinks is essential to automotive SEO, car dealerships can also improve their local visibility through online directories. Local SEO, or geotargeting, allows car dealers to target specific areas and attract customers within that service radius. Local listings can be found on search engines and online business directories. Ensuring that the information on these listings matches your dealership’s website and other offline sources is essential. This will help ensure consistency and prevent data duplication, which can confuse prospective customers.
Additionally, it’s a good idea to use Google’s free business descriptions feature. These descriptions can help your dealership stand out from competitors and highlight your unique selling proposition. Be sure to include keywords in these descriptions, as this will improve your chances of being discovered by potential customers.
Optimize Your Reviews
Car dealerships need to be available online to meet the needs of their customers. The average automotive customer conducts a digital journey that includes 900+ interactions, which may consist of watching videos of vehicles, reading reviews, viewing photos, and researching pricing, models, features, safety ratings, and more. SEO can ensure this information is easily found on your website and other channels. The right keywords will help with this, as you want to select the words with high search volumes relevant to the types of cars (and related services) you sell. As more and more consumers turn to the internet for research, comparing models and prices, valuing trade-ins, identifying dealerships, and more, it is crucial for car dealerships to invest in SEO to remain visible. And while it might not be as flashy as funneling advertising dollars into social media, television, and radio commercials, it is more effective in building trust and generating qualified leads ready to make a sale.
