How can you get more people to check out the cars at your dealership? One of the best ways is to use some proven SEO strategies for car dealers.
Stop running outdated ads and sending out mailers. Those old-school methods of attracting shoppers are over. In today’s world, your car shoppers begin their vehicle search online and can engage with your team through direct marketing that includes some proven SEO strategies. You won’t need to think outside the box because the box is built and makes a lot of sense.
Here are a few great SEO strategies to drive traffic to dealer websites.
Perform a complete website audit
Before reaching out to your potential customers, ensure your site is useful and easy for them to navigate. This means focusing on what matters to your shoppers. A few things you should include on your website’s pages are:
- At least 400 words on your homepage
- Include your address and phone number on every page
- Check that each page has a title tag, meta description, and image alt text
- Add a search bar and social sharing plugins
Is your content useful?
What will users get out of the content you share on your site or blog? One of the easiest and most proven SEO strategies for any car dealer is to offer content that interests and is useful to shoppers. This content can be the latest vehicle news, how-to information, or tips on places to go in the local area. When your potential customers can benefit from your content, they will associate it with your dealership and be more likely to review your inventory when looking for their next vehicle.
Check your Google My Business page
When a customer looks up your dealership online, will they see all of the information they need? Does this page offer a link to your website, your business hours, location, a consistent logo, and some information about your dealership? This is one of the easiest ways to drive traffic to your doorstep. Customers are looking for the vehicles you sell, and they need to be easy to find, especially online. If anything is missing, it’s time to update this page and make it useful to site visitors.
Auto dealer schema is a must
Schema markup helps search engines and site crawlers understand your content. This can help improve your position on search engines by telling the engine what your data means, not simply what it says. Using this code helps bring your website to a position on the search page that users will notice. This is one of the easiest and best SEO strategies to ensure your car dealer website shows up when customers search for services and products available at your location.
Create authority through citations
When other local businesses mention your car dealership on their website pages, this is called a citation. This citation gives you validation and credibility in the community, which improves your local SEO ranking. These citations are important and necessary to ensure you rank high on search engines. Get your site listed on your local chamber of commerce website or other reputable business directories covering your local area. Use Moz Local or Yext to get your dealership’s details published properly.
Get other local sites linking to your website
Gather links from local websites and organizations to improve your local SEO ranking. You can do this through sponsorships, community events, and other activities that put your website out there with others in the local community. Sponsor a sports team or host car meet-ups at your dealership. These events typically have sites and pages that will link to your page as a sponsor. This is an easy way to get more community visibility and credibility and is proven to be one of the best SEO strategies for any car dealer.
Understand your reports and analytics
When you understand the information in your reports, you’ll see how your SEO strategies are performing to support your dealer website. Unlike older advertising methods, using analytics and reports that show activity on your website, you’ll see where some shoppers are leaving your site. This gives you a good idea of which pages might need to be improved or aren’t working the way you want. These reports also allow you to perform an A and B marketing strategy, which compares two methods with only small differences.
These SEO strategies can help push viewers to your dealer website and eventually lead more shoppers to your location. This is the new way to get people in the door to buy cars.
