Category

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Search Engine Optimization with your Website Vendor

Auto dealer search engine optimization is one of the most important things when it comes to the success of your car dealership website.  Without it, most of your potential car buyers wouldn’t be able to find your site online.  This is why your dealership website vendor needs to be well-versed in SEO, and be able to educate their dealership clients.

Avoid changing the keywords and SEO text on your dealership website.  When you have questions or if you disagree with what is being placed on your site, it’s important to have a discussion with your SEO vendor.  There may be a bigger plan than what you see, or your SEO vendor may have been mistaken about keywords your dealership wants to target. This is also true of other vendors that may want to change the SEO aspect of your site.

Of course, auto dealers should be (and are) in control of the search engine optimization on their dealership website.  Your SEO vendor should respect the changes you wish to make, help to educate you if they disagree, and be able to explain why they are doing what they are.  This is a huge part of being a SEO vendor, and I discourage dealers from partnering with any vendor that doesn’t abide by these practices.

Google Local Business Best Practices

Google has recently updated their Local Business listings guidelines in their efforts to further discourage any spam or inappropriate use of their Local Business listing service.  The new guidelines are listed here.

If your car dealer website provider or your Internet department has already listed your dealer website in the Google local listings, then you should probably double check to make sure that they adhere to these new rules, including:

1)      The business name on Google Maps must be your full legal business name.

2)      PO Boxes do not count as physical locations.

3)      If multiple users will be updating your business listing, use a shared, business email account.

4)      If possible, use an email account with a domain that matches your business URL. For example, if your business website is www.dealership.com, a matching email address would be you@dealership.com.

Google is always trying to refine the algorithms that they use to produce the most relevant, useful search results they can.  Either your Internet manager or your car dealer SEO consultants need to stay on top of Google’s ongoing changes and updates to make sure your dealership doesn’t get left behind.

Google Local Search

Google has done a great job making their search results better and more effective for the car buyers that use their search engine, especially when it comes to local search.  As it stands now, those who search Google for a term like “Ford dealership” or “used Nissan dealer” will see local results for these terms, even if a city isn’t included in the actual search term.

While this greatly helps searchers, and even your dealership, it isn’t helpful if you are attempting to research your competing dealership websites.  For example, if you want to see what PPC ads are appearing when you search for your competitor’s dealership name or where your dealership website ranks for those who search in the next town over, you may not be able to see what someone in that neighboring city would see.

That’s why the website SearchMuffin is great.  This site allows you to choose the city you’d like to see Google search results for, allowing your dealership to see what local searchers see when they search in Google.  You can use this information to see how well your dealership ranks in neighboring cities, as well as which PPC ads appear for those same searches.

Your dealership can use this data to tweak your website search engine optimization (SEO) to help your dealer website to rank higher in the search results of neighboring cities.  Don’t let your competing dealerships rule the search engine results without your dealership knowing about it–this could mean a loss in potential car sales.

Dealership Demographic Targeting

Knowing how different groups of people use the Internet can help your auto dealership effectively target your online marketing and earn more sales.  When you take the time to segment and understand your market, it becomes easier for your dealership to send the right message to the right people at the right time, resulting in more sales for your dealership.

It seems as though one of the factors that most determines how users browse the Internet is gender.  eMarketer recently conducted a study that found slightly more women say they use the Internet than men.  The study also found that men tend to browse the Internet longer per online session that women do.  One reason for this increase in online engagement for men could be that men are more interested in watching online videos than women are.

Your dealership can use this information to better target men who may be shopping your dealer site for their next car.  Try adding videos of your new and used inventory to increase the amount of time your web visitors spend viewing your inventory.  Online video will also help satisfy those car shoppers who spend their time online watching videos.

This is one example of how knowing what your market wants can help your dealership sell more cars.  Placing videos of your dealership inventory on your dealer website can help increase the time that web visitors spend on your site, as well as how engaged they are while viewing your videos.  If you dealership isn’t taking full advantage of car inventory videos, you are missing out on potential sales.

Dealership Long-Tail SEO Searches

A recent study by Comscore finds that the “average” search term entered into Google continues to get longer and longer.  As it stands, the average search term contains just over 3 words, and this increase in the length of search terms doesn’t appear to be slowing.

This makes search engine optimization (SEO) even more important than ever for your auto dealer website.  Since Google uses “best-fit” guidelines to match search terms to relevant web pages, if a long-tail search doesn’t fit something exactly, Google will try to fit a web page to the search.  The better optimized your auto dealership site is, the more of these searches your website will rank for, even if you don’t have the exact words that were searched for.

While the increase in long-tail search terms is great for SEO effectiveness, it’s not as great of news for car dealerships that rely solely on pay-per-click advertising (PPC).  Many dealerships set up their paid ad campaigns so that their ads only appear for an “exact match” of keywords.  This means that your dealership ad will only show if the search term is the exact same as a keyword you bid on.  With search terms getting longer and more specific, the chances of getting an “exact match” to a keyword your dealership is bidding on gets more unlikely.  Slight differences in the way your account is set-up can make huge differences in your results, so it’s important that your dealership either has someone in-house who fully understands and devotes time to managing your PPC campaigns, or that you partner with an expert vendor.

Combining your auto dealership’s PPC campaign with an effective SEO campaign will increase the chances that your dealer website will be found in Google’s search engine results.  Simply relying on pay-per-click will make your dealership website show in search engine results less and less often as time goes on.

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