There are a lot of different ways to improve your search engine optimization (SEO) for your dealership. With the amount of information there is out there about SEO and how to implement it, it can get kind of overwhelming. We have put together a small guide for the best SEO strategy for your dealership. Hopefully by following these steps you can begin to improve your SEO and build a better business.
Google My Business (GMB) is the simplest tool you can use for your dealership’s SEO strategy. This tool has a lot of features to help promote your dealership so it is best to stay alert and keep up with any new updates that may come out of it. The most important thing to start with is to make sure all of your business information is accurate and up to date. First and foremost, verify that the name, address, and phone number of your dealership are correct and consistent across all pages and platforms. Secondly, make sure that your hours listed on GMB are correct and if anything changes, update the page. During the time of the coronavirus pandemic, the hours of many businesses changed and some of them failed to update their GMB. This can be frustrating for visitors trying to get in contact with them or trying to visit their business in person. Additionally, within GMB you can create categories that describe your business and any services you may offer. With this tool, Google is able to use those categories with relevant search engines. Two of the most important parts of GMB are the reviews and questions and answers sections. These two sections are where you can engage the most with users and develop a relationship with them before and after they have left your dealership. With reviews, it is important to respond to negative and positive reviews that are being left on your page. By doing so, you are showing that you care about the quality of your services and what your customers have to say. Finally, with the question and answers section you should be checking this very regularly. Other users who are not a part of your dealership are able to answer questions which may lead to misinformation and miscommunication so it is best to answer those questions before someone else does.
What you used to know and understand about keywords may be different now. In order for your SEO strategy to thrive, you must understand the importance of keywords and how they can affect your business. “Keyword abuse” has the potential to drive your webpage rankings down, so using keywords in moderation is the best practice. Search engines will do three things when you first public a new page on your site; crawl, index, and serve. Search engines are always crawling the Internet, searching for new web pages that need to be added to its index. Once it finds a new web page, search engines will attempt to figure out what the page is about and index it properly. Finally, with serve, a search engine will look over its index to serve a list of the highest quality answers when a user searches for a specific query. The way keywords used to work was that you would be able to cram your keyword onto your page as many times as possible in order to increase your search rankings. Nowadays that can be very detrimental to your rankings. It is incredibly important to use keywords in a more natural way and organic way such as putting them in meta titles, descriptions, and heading tags. Additionally, another good strategy for keyword research is to produce content which focuses on the most competitive keywords and relevant variations of long tail keywords.
Make sure you are regularly checking your dealership’s website for technical health errors. Some technical errors you should be looking for are:
- Broken links: These can display error messages when clicked so check every link on your website to ensure they are all working properly
- Duplicate title tags and meta descriptions: Each page on your site should have a unique title and description so check that you do not have any repeats throughout your pages
- Proper index directive: Verify that you have a proper index directive by having a robots.txt file in place. This will direct search engine crawlers towards the pages you want to be crawled and the ones that they should ignore
- Internal linking: With internal linking you can provide users with links to extra content that are natural extensions of the page they entered your dealer site from
- Redirect chains: These can slow down your site. Make sure to clean out your old redirects in order to get site visitors to their destination as efficiently as possible.
- Alt-image text: Provide these on your site so that all of your images have a descriptive alt text for visitors using a screen reader. This will also be helpful for search engines in order to create image context
- XML sitemap: Clean your sitemap and make sure your pages are not redirecting, have been indexed, and do not contain any broken links
Figuring out the best SEO strategy for your dealership can be a challenging task but hopefully we have made it at least a little bit easier. There is a lot of information out there about how to best use your SEO to benefit your business so this is only the beginning. If you are looking for further assistance with your SEO strategy, we are more than happy to help! Send us a message or call us at (515) 232-2024 for more information.