Content that Pulls Web Traffic to Your Site
- Oscar Vanderkooij, Goodson Acura
Promoting your dealership online requires a different marketing strategy than when you're advertising to customers on television, radio, or in print. Online users are a different breed. You cannot rely on advertising alone to draw these Internet customers onto your dealership lot. People surf the Internet for information and answers and are looking for valuable content. You can no longer just "push" your advertising out to these people, hoping they'll see it. Your dealership website needs SEO Accelerator™ to match your car dealership with those online customers that are looking for it.
80% of new car purchasers start researching their vehicle purchase by using a search engine. Search engines reward those websites that give searchers what they want (quality content) by showing them higher on results pages. Since so much of your potential website traffic is using search engines to find information about their next purchase, how can you create quality content that will be picked-up by search engines and draw visitors to your site? By focusing on creating quality content, and then promoting that content, you can hold down costs and drive traffic to your website for years to come.
Here are some tips:
Create an Article Bank
Articles are a great way to brand you as an expert in the auto industry, and they make for valuable website content. When writing, make sure to use words that searchers may use when trying to find information online. Using these keywords will increase your SEO ranking. Potential article topics are endless, and if you don't like to write you can always find articles in online article directories. Just make sure you give proper credit and the articles are relevant to the auto industry.
Get on the Blogging Bandwagon
Blogs are a great way to create useful content, and because they are much more conversational than many other forms of media, they give you a great way to interact with visitors and customers. You can blog about any number of topics, like timely news items relating to the industry, and then give your visitors the opportunity to post comments. Make sure to use keywords related to the auto industry to give your blog an SEO boost.
RSS Feeds
An RSS feed (in the simplest terms) is a way that frequently updated websites can disperse information to readers or other websites. Because of how frequently they update, they are very search engine friendly. By installing an RSS feed reader on your website, you can create content that updates itself. Continually updated information will catch the eye of search engines, resulting in higher rankings for your site, and therefore more visitors. Again, just make sure that what you're linking to is relevant to the auto industry.
The Power of News
Posting news about your company in the form of press releases is a valuable way to create quality content. Press releases can be about a lot of things, from new hires to things that are going on at your dealership. If your car dealership is actively involved in your local community - for example every year you donate a percentage of gross sales to a local nonprofit organization - promoting a press release is the optimal way to let people know that you value community involvement. Once you create the press release, you can submit it to online press release directories which will increase your SEO rankings. Make sure that you also post it on your dealership blog or website for added search engine exposure.
Optimize Your Site
Your website should be built on a platform designed for SEO ranking. If not, you need to talk to your website provider. Beyond that, the content on your site, from the welcome message to your inventory descriptions, needs to be full of relevant keywords. This will help to ensure that search engines pick up on your site, and rank it well. Other valuable ways to optimize your site are to submit it to online directories and exchange links with other sites. As always, it's very important to make sure these directories and websites that you link to are relevant to the auto industry. If they aren't, you could be doing more SEO harm than good.
Goodson Acura increased their Search traffic 60% with DealerOn.
