Car Dealership SEO

How Can Automotive SEO Help My Dealership Succeed? 

There are a number of ways in which automotive SEO can help your dealership succeed. First, it can help you generate more leads by increasing your visibility online. And since most car shoppers begin their buying journey with an online search, this is vital to success. Additionally, automotive SEO can help improve your website’s conversion rate by making sure your site is accurate and up-to-date, as well as easy to navigate. Finally, automotive SEO can help improve customer satisfaction by ensuring that potential customers can easily find the information they need about your dealership online. 

In a crowded and competitive marketplace, it’s more important than ever for automotive dealerships to have a strong and effective digital marketing strategy. Search engine optimization (SEO) is a key component of any such strategy, and today we’re going to take a deep dive into what automotive SEO is and how it can help your dealership succeed. 

What Is Automotive SEO?

Automotive SEO is the process of optimizing your website and online presence for the specific keywords and phrases that potential customers are using to search for your products and services. At Stahl SEO, our SEO strategy pushes your website higher in search engine results pages (SERPs) for relevant automotive keywords. By ranking higher in SERPs, you increase your website’s visibility, which leads to more traffic from potential customers. In short, SEO helps potential customers find your dealership online.

With nearly 90% of car shoppers beginning their buying journey online, it’s more important than ever for dealerships to have a strong online presence. And since organic search results are some of the most trusted by consumers, it’s essential that your dealership show up in those search results. That’s where automotive SEO comes in. By optimizing your site for the specific needs of the automotive industry, you can make sure your dealership has a strong online presence and is visible to potential customers who are searching for the products and services you offer. 

Paid Ads vs SEO

Many dealership operators are well-versed on outward facing digital advertising campaigns. There are plenty of sophisticated advertising agencies that will allocate a large monthly budget to various ad platforms like television, radio, display, social and paid search ads. Paid ads are a great way to put your dealership’s products in front of potential customers.

SEO is different from traditional or digital paid advertising. Rather than paying to put your website in front of customers via an ad, SEO allows customers to naturally find you via search engines like Google, Bing or Yahoo. Since the customer found you rather than vice versa, there is a certain level of trust that is built at the onset of the customer-business relationship. This trust is further evidenced by the significant increase in conversion rate from customers who found you organically vs through a targeted advertising campaign.

Traditional and digital advertising will likely always have a place in a dealership’s monthly budget. However, SEO can provide long-term value that continues to generate leads even if you were to cancel your SEO campaign. No matter the size of your monthly advertising budget, a well-rounded digital strategy should always include an SEO content campaign.

How Does Automotive SEO Work?

The automotive SEO landscape is constantly evolving. Search engines update their algorithm to provide the best results possible to their customers, and it’s important to ensure your website is complying with their “best practice” guidelines. At Stahl SEO, our focus is directed at providing your potential customers with the best website experience possible. Our automotive content strategy ensures that customers find you when they type your products and services into a search engine. We do this by focusing on the most important ranking factors that search engines use to evaluate website content. 

Automotive SEO Best Practices

#1 Keyword Research

Any decent SEO campaign begins with Keyword Research. Before you can start optimizing your website for search engines, you need to know which keywords your customers are typing into search engines. At Stahl SEO, we perform extensive keyword research for all of our automotive clients. We analyze your top-ranking competitors to identify any keywords specific to your market. We also use software programs which help us understand the monthly search volume of relevant keywords. With years of experience under our belt, our keyword research is quite extensive. We target keywords that attract customers to all lines of business: from new and used car sales to service and parts. Once we’ve identified the most important keywords for your business, we move on to content.

#2 Create Content

Content is the buzzword of the digital marketing industry and for good reason. All of the major social media platforms from Facebook to Instagram to Tik Tok rely on content creators to give their customers the best online experience possible. Google Search is no different. If websites stopped making unique and quality content for their customers, the overall experience of the search engines would diminish. Customers would have a harder time finding the products and services they are looking for and would eventually abandon Google for another digital channel. As a result, Google rewards the websites that put out the best and most useful content for their user. At Stahl SEO, we consider ourselves to be content creators first and foremost. We know that high-quality content will always outperform low-quality content in the long run. Our content has a proven track record to rank high and generate traffic for your website. 

#3 Backlinks

Backlinks are links from other websites pointing back to yours. They’re an important ranking factor for SEO because they signal to search engines that other sites vouch for yours—which helps improve your site’s trustworthiness and authority. Many SEO companies will lead their customers astray by placing spam links to their client’s websites. This can and will lead to penalties from Google and other search engines and may keep your website from ranking entirely. Our backlink strategy is simple. We prioritize backlinks from reputable and local websites only when necessary. As a content marketing company, we put our effort into generating excellent, user-friendly content that ranks without the use of backlinks. However, we know that a website with relevant backlinks may outperform a website with fewer backlinks. We build relevant backlinks when it’s necessary to get your website over the hump and into Google’s #1 search position. 

In today’s digital world, it’s more important than ever for dealerships to have a strong and effective digital marketing strategy. An Automotive SEO campaign is an investment in your website. At Stahl SEO, we provide unique and engaging content that is guaranteed to increase your website traffic and visibility. Call us today and let us show you how to increase your dealership’s online presence in as little as six months.