As a car dealer, you need to ensure your customer’s know what vehicles you currently have on your lot and if you are offering any sales or discounts. Ensuring that your website has complete visibility to customers should be your number one priority. Television, radio, and newspaper advertisements are no longer the only way, nor are they the best way to advertise. As the majority of consumers are using the web, search engine optimization is the optimal way to advertise. In this article, we’ve compiled a complete checklist that has been adapted for automotive dealerships to ensure their website is able to make the most of SEO.
Pay Attention To Your Website
With over 3.17 billion individuals actively subscribing to the Internet at any given time, there is a good chance that one of your current customers, or prospective customers, will be surfing the internet at any given point. When they go online to search for a new or used car, will your dealership come up ranking high on the Google search page?
If your website is not on the first two pages of a Google search, chances are that prospective customers won’t go looking for you. So, to ensure that you receive a higher ranking, it’s imperative that you design a website that stands out from your competitors through a responsive website that is mobile friendly. Your website should also include social media plugins, meta descriptions, headings, and a title.
Make Use of Content
If you want your website to be as competitive online as you are at a physical dealership, you need to ensure you are making good use of relevant, unique and up-to-date content at all times. Having relevant content on your website is sure to add a great amount of value to your website rankings. It’s also important for you to continually include new and interesting tidbits about the car industry, the cars currently on your lot, as well as new cars that will be coming out in the new year.
By creating and uploading unique and relevant content by perhaps adding a blog or two about the car industry, providing some interesting tidbits of car facts or some vehicle trivia to catch their eye. All of this will bring in your consumers by making your website their go-to site for all things automotive.
When choosing the content to put on your web page, remember that the shorter and catchier the content is, the better. You only have about eight seconds to attract the attention of an average website viewer. If their eye doesn’t catch something at first glance they could skim right past your site and you will become lost forever in the Internet sphere.
Take Advantage of Keywords
When setting up or updating your website, ensure that you are using keywords that relate to and hold relevance to your car dealership. The keywords you use are what is going to grab the viewer’s attention. It will inevitably make them want to open your page when they see it appear on the Google search page. You want to ensure that the keywords you use are regular words a person searching the internet for car dealerships would be using in their search queries. Good content and keywords are very important parts of the Google ranking system. It won’t help you to use have complex keywords that only other specialists in the automotive will understand.
Ways to Improve Your Website on the Google Ranking System
When competing with the various other car dealership websites that are available for consumers to view, you need to ensure that your dealership’s website is at the top of all the relevant Google search ranking system. Though there are various ways for you to achieve this, there are five main ways that will make the most difference.
- Always publish relevant and quality content. As mentioned above, when the content on your website is of good quality, which you design specifically for viewers interested in buying or leasing a car, it will increase the amount of traffic that your website attracts.
- Ensure you update the content on your web page on a regular basis. Just because a certain content was relevant last week or month, doesn’t necessarily mean it will still be as relevant this week. Making sure you check the quality and relevance of content on a regular basis ensures your customers are getting up-to-date information about your dealership. This, in turn, will also increase your seniority on all things automotive.
- Metadata. There are three types of metadata—title metadata, which is most important, description metadata, which is what is used to describe what is available on your web page and keyword metadata, which should be limited to 6-8 phrases that are 1-4 words in length. Keyword metadata must be kept short so that Google searches can pick up on the authority of your keywords.
- Make sure that your site is “link-worthy”. Make sure that your site is more than just a “click here” link. Create something that is catchy, such as “Chucks Chevy Cars” which supplies lots of keywords in the link and will be an improvement to your web pages google search ranking.
- Take advantage of ALT tags. By using alternative text descriptions, such as visual and video media, you are improving the order in which search engines find your web page, particularly if someone is using a “text only” browser.
Using Your Website to Attract Customers
Now that you know how to optimize the SEO content and keywords on your web page to attract viewers to your website, you need to know how to attract customers. You can do this by taking a survey of your customer’s wants and needs. Routinely post a survey on your website, as well as having a hard copy available at the dealership. Once you get enough survey results, you can get a good idea of what customers are looking for any a new or used car. It can also be a general service survey to get a feel for what your customers are wanting to be changed or improved.
Social media is another great way to attract a customer following to your web page. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google Plus are excellent social media sites in which customers post things that they like and dislike about car dealerships. Most of the time, they’ll be from your actual customers sharing their experience onto their followers. You can use this information to your advantage for ensuring that you are doing the things customers like.
Focus On The Local SEO
Local SEO has become very popular with the onslaught of mobile search protocols. These days, a mobile internet user has a higher amount of Internet use than a computer user. This is generally due to users almost always having their mobile devices, such as phone and tablets, with them at all times, allowing them with the access the web at their whim. A business must be certain that their content is relevant to result in constant internet search queries. It is of utmost importance that your website has a high ranking in the Google system because you want these mobile users to visit and choose your site when searching car dealerships to find your business first. Due to recent studies, it was discovered that 50% of customers conducting local searches from their mobile devices actually visited the business they found on Google as soon as the next day. However, only 34% of users performing google searches from their laptops did. Because of these statistics is it more urgent that you do the following to maximize your business exposure online:
- Get your business enrolled in the “Google My Business” site.
- Be sure to apply your local business graphics to Google to ensure your location is known.
- Verify all contact information of your dealership is up to date, including details like your phone number, fax, email, and web address).
Earn Positive Reviews From Your Customers
Encourage your customers to post their comments about their recent visit to your dealership on their website. In doing so, it will provide a more credible position, business credibility, and authenticity for future customers to review about you and your dealership. Positive comments and even some negative feedback are always a good tool for every business to use in their attempts to provide and build a larger customer satisfaction database.
Through this checklist and guide, your dealership will be on the right track to have an optimized search engine that is bound to bring more traffic to your site.
