If you are in charge of your dealership’s marketing strategy, then you are probably constantly tweaking your website so that it inches up the search rankings.
Whether you have built your website from scratch or used a template provided by a manufacturer, you have probably invested considerable time and effort into your site.
If you have used a web template as your foundation, you might be surprised to learn that your rankings may be hurt by that; the algorithms that Google and the major search engines use penalize web designs that are repetitive.
However, the good news is that this small setback can be overcome with effective SEO techniques.
Using these proven strategies should elevate your rankings rapidly.
- Quality content—Since Google introduced its Penguin update in 2012, the name of the game in SEO is content. By introducing new algorithms that punish poorly written content that may be stuffed to capacity with keywords, paid links, or duplicate information, Google has declared it is primarily concerned with content that is valuable to viewers. The most important way to improve SEO for your dealership is to regularly post new, high quality articles, images and videos that will appeal to viewers and inspire comments, Facebook likes, and discussions.
- Organic link building—Gone are the days when slapping some hyperlinks into a text could elevate rankings. Google still rewards links, but the links must be organic, which means they must be topical and relevant. Merely sharing a link with another site isn’t enough; the links should be to sites, and especially, pages that are related to the anchor material. These linked sites should also be highly ranked by search engines in order to enhance SEO for your dealership. The point of link building is to help generate cross-site traffic, which the search engines will recognize and reward.
- Compelling meta descriptions—A brief description for each page on your website will help improve SEO for your dealership in a couple of ways. Although the search engines have limited the value of meta tags in SEO, they remain an important way of detailing the information on a page, which helps searchers choose to click on your site. Introducing one or two keywords in this description also may assist in SEO.
- Google Webmasters Tools—Although these tools do not alter your site’s rankings, they do provide critical insights into how Google, the most important search engine, reviews your website. Submitting a dynamically built sitemap to Webmasters Tools also encourages Google to crawl your new content and index it. Perhaps the most important way these tools improve SEO for your dealership is that it identifies issues, which may be detrimentally affecting your rankings.
There are a variety of techniques to improve SEO for your dealership, but the most important ones should not only help you move up the rankings, but also more actively engage visitors.
Quality content and links are essential to any SEO strategy in 2013, so producing material that is appealing to visitors will help your site dominate your competitors.
Obviously the end goal of having better SEO is to get more traffic to your website. While we encourage dealerships to work on their SEO, we have also created several marketing and advertising tactics that generate a tremendous amount of leads for dealerships.
Want to learn how? Click the link below: