By now, most dealers know they need some type of SEO strategy to stay competitive online. But what exactly goes into that?
Website Optimization? Yes.
Linkbuilding? You betcha.
Content? Without a doubt!
While you've heard of these terms and how important they are, do you really know the details of what really makes them work for your dealership? If not, how are you going to hold your SEO or full-service digital marketing company accountable?
Here are the SEO strategy twists most digital marketing vendors don't want you to know.
Fresh, Quality, Purposeful Content is an Absolute Necessity
Your website provider or digital marketing company may say they're creating content for your dealership's website, but was that a one-time deal or are they staying consistent? If not, you can kiss any hope of ROI down the toilet.
The four most important things Google looks for in content are purpose, quality, freshness, and consistency.
- Purpose: What problem does this content solve? Is the information beneficial to your site's users? If you can't answer either, you're dealing with content without a purpose. Consider that the web's "Rebel Without a Cause."
- Quality: More than just good writing, quality content is about organization, depth, and overall presentation. This includes proper fact-checking, readability, and relevant imagery.
- Freshness: Google loves to know that your website is keeping up with the times. By publishing content about recent industry news and other developments, you're establishing yourself as a valuable source of information.
- Consistency: Quantity is not as important as it once was for content, but consistency still matters greatly. Going hand-in-hand with freshness, consistent content creation (accompanied by purpose and quality) is what helps drives more and more organic traffic to dealership websites.
Great content strategies also establishes purpose with already-purposeful and quality content. Tying together existing content on your dealership's site, relationships between different pages are built, allowing your dealership to gather more authority from search engines for the keywords car buyers in your area use to find dealerships.
Successful Linkbuilding Strategies Now Mimic Content Strategies
Like content, linkbuilding used to be all about quantity. The more links, the better. Forget source, context, or anything about the end user's experience, we just want to rank #1.
Of course, SEO has evolved to favor quality over quantity, as Google and other search engines made adjustments to encourage sites to consider user experience in their digital marketing efforts.
An effective linkbuilding strategy now focuses on targeting relevant sites with relevant content, and building links consistently over time instead of all at once. This means car dealers need to seek out authoritative sites related to the automotive industry, not random directories that accept any and every link.
Search engines understand the context of links and if you can earn relevant links on quality, trusted sites in your industry, they'll pass more authority to your site in return.
Website Optimization is More Than Just Design and Content Adjustments
Google wants to send its users to fast websites. If your dealership's site isn't fast enough for users, they'll click the back button and click through to one of your competitors.
Not only will that help them, as they gain another visit, it will eventually hurt your overall rankings. The more users click back to search results from your dealership's site, the more Google will associate your site with low-quality results. Soon enough, you'll be pushed out in favor of sites that are deemed more worthy of top ranks.
Hold your website vendor accountable in this situation by requesting an audit of your site's speed compared to your major competitors. And while you're at it, do one yourself using tools like Pingdom's Website Speed Test and Google's PageSpeed Insights.
They're likely not going to tell you that their competitors are building faster websites, and they're certainly not likely to spend the time and resources necessary to fix your site's issues, so for a non-biased audit of your website, and recommendations on the most innovation automotive website providers, contact Wikimotive. We're not a website provider, so we have no dog in the fight!
Written by Mark Frost, Director of Content at Wikimotive
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