SEO for Dealerships

Mastering SEO

Search engine optimization or SEO is a crucial marketing tool your dealer should master either in-house or through a marketing agency. There are different elements of SEO, some require more planning and executing, while others are easier to tackle.

All About Mobile

People are browsing on their smartphones and tablets more often than browsing on a desktop. This means your dealer’s website needs to be optimized for mobile. Your website may layout differently on a smaller screen, so it’s important that you preview your site on mobile before implementing big changes to your desktop site. You also want to pay attention to page load times because people barely spend more than two seconds to wait for a page to load before going to another site.

Improve Your Photos

When it comes to photos and SEO, you want to make sure your photo files are named appropriately instead of IMG1234.jpg, be more specific like FordF1504Door.jpg. Search engines are looking for different content on your site and the more elements you have optimized for the search engines the better. This also goes for alternate descriptions. This is the text that shows up when you hover over an image, which can be helpful for customers, especially if the image is taking a little while to load. Speaking of load times, you want your images to be high-resolution, but you want to keep in mind that a high-resolution image may take a few seconds to load, and your customers will rarely wait around for those images to load.

Keep Your Keyword Game Strong

Keywords are crucial to your SEO. Keywords play a strong role in SEO, but with the shift to voice search using virtual assistants like Alexa and Google, your use of keywords will change slightly. Instead of one or two-word keywords, start implementing long-chain keywords or phrases. Think about what your customers are searching for and word your content in a way that answers their questions in a conversational way.

Collect Reviews

Reviews are game changers. Whether they live on your website or Google, reviews help potential customers make a choice whether to visit your dealer or a competitor’s dealer. Of course, the goal is to build up your arsenal with positive reviews, but sometimes a poor review is added to the mix. Respond to all reviews in a timely and respectful manner and offer to correct any errors if there are any dissatisfied customers. Encourage your loyal and new customers to write a review about their buying or service experience at your dealer. Offer incentives like savings on service or a gift card; they’ll be more inclined to write a review.

Schema Mark-up

Now, schema mark-up focuses on the back-end of your website and deals with your website’s code. When you mark-up your website’s code it’s helpful to be as descriptive as possible so the search engines don’t mistake a price on your website for a different value like a phone number. There are many ways to use schema to optimize your site and more information can be found at Schema.org. It’s important to leave the schema and code updating to your web designers.

Improve Your SEO, Today

Search engine optimization is complex to a certain extent because of so many elements that a search engine considers before serving your website to potential customers. It’s important to start making improvements to your website, today. You also will want to have a dedicated employee whose focus is on SEO. It’s an important part of your marketing strategy and changes may not happen overnight, but the sooner you start, the sooner your rankings in search results will improve.