Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Have you ever gone to add your auto dealer website to Google Places only to find someone else has already claimed and verified it?  We run into this from time to time while setting up listings, and recently found this information on what to do.

First, make sure no one in your dealership has already taken the initiative to set up and claim your businesses listing.  Once you’ve done this, here are the steps to take:

Create your listing, making sure that:

• Your dealership name, address, URL, and email address are exact
• Add a local phone number, not an 800 number
• Create a 200-character or less description of your dealership
• Make the listing as interactive as possible with up to ten images smaller than 1MB and 1024×1025 pixels, as well as links to up to five videos.
• Describe what makes your dealership different from your competitors in the additional details section.
• Verify your listing through Google.

After you have your completely accurate listing created and verified, you have to tell Google Places that there are duplicate listings.  Go to the listing you didn’t create (that you want removed) and click on “Edit this Place”.

Select the “Place has another listing” button and enter the URL of your accurate listing and state that you want the previous entry removed.  Make sure you check back to ensure the listing was removed within a few weeks–you may have to go through the removal process multiple times.

Ever wondered how Google’s search engine works?  This cool info-graphic is definitely worth taking a look at.  While it doesn’t give away the things Google uses to rank sites, it does lend some insight into how the search engine delivers the websites you search for.

How Google Works

Infographic by the Pay Per Click Blog

As I’m sure most people have heard, Google came out with a new feature yesterday that they’re calling Instant Search.  Since the announcement has been all over the Internet, I thought I’d try to explain what Instant Search does and how it can help your car dealer website.

Google’s Instant Search resembles their auto-suggest feature, where potential search terms are auto populated into a drop down below the search box.  Instant Search differs from auto-suggest in that instead of potential search terms showing, the search is actually performed as Google fills in their auto-suggest.  Here’s an example of how Instant Search works:

So how will this affect your car dealership and your search engine optimization?  It’s hard to know exactly how this new technology will change SEO results and practices, but I think this will help car dealers, especially those optimized for long-tail search.

Before, web searchers using Google had to commit to a search term, just one at a time.  Even though Google would auto suggest additional keywords, searchers had to hit the enter button or click to make the search happen.

With Instant Search, search users can see what their search results will look like without having to commit.  For example, if they start to search for “Boston Nissan” and only see 3rd party, national sites, they are more likely to make their search term more specific.  If “Boston Nissan” doesn’t show them what they want to see, perhaps “Boston Nissan dealership” will or “Boston Nissan used cars”.  Car buyers won’t have to hit search to see what their results will be, leaving the door open for more detailed long tail searches.

Is your dealership ready?  Make sure you’re in contact with your search engine optimization vendor or dealership website provider to ensure your site is prepared and optimized to deal with the recent changes to Google’s search technology.

Now that Google’s search engine update, Caffeine, is live everywhere, a lot of people have questions about how it will impact search engine results, and more specifically, what car dealers can do to better optimize for this update.

I wanted to answer both questions, so let’s start with how Caffeine will impact search engine optimization in general.  Caffeine is an update to Google’s indexing system.  In other words, Caffeine helps “all content (and not just content deemed ‘real time’) can be searchable within seconds after its crawled” according to Google’s Matt Cutts.  Now that Caffeine is live, your web pages will make it from Google’s search engine crawlers to the actual search engine result pages more quickly.

The answer to the questions of what auto dealerships can do to better optimize now that Caffeine has arrived is nothing.  Nothing, that is, that you aren’t already doing to optimize your car dealer website.

Word from Google is that this update to their indexing system doesn’t make any of the crawling, indexing, or ranking factors any more or less important than they were before.  It does make content available in search engine results more quickly after being crawled by Google’s bots.

Auto dealership website search engine optimization (SEO) best practices still apply: proper keyword research, individual inventory pages, proper website structure, regularly updated content, and video optimization, just to name a few.  If you have any questions about how to properly optimize your car dealer site for Google and other search engines, ask your SEO or marketing vendor for more information.

Search engine optimization can be a complicated process, especially since Google is rumored to use over 200 factors when determining how high (or low) your car dealership website ranks on their result pages.  While most people attribute successful SEO to things like keywords, meta tags, and external links, some SEO vendors forget about the importance of internal linking.

Internal linking is just another way to help Google, or other search engines, tell what each page on your car dealer website is about.  Essentially, internal links are those that go from one page of your site to another (external links are to another site).  One reason internal links are a valuable focus for your SEO efforts is because you can control the text that is linked (anchor text), an important aspect of SEO for your dealership site.

Another benefit of internal linking is that is helps create a content silo for your auto dealership website.  Search engines look at the internal linking structure (which pages link to which, the anchor text used) to not only learn what each page is about, but also to help judge the quality of the site.  A well maintained content silo on your auto dealership site can be an extremely valuable part of your SEO efforts.

Make sure your dealership site has internal linking that is well-planned and effective.  If it doesn’t, ask your auto dealer website provider why.  It’s an important part of a well-rounded search engine optimization strategy for car dealers.