Stop choosing sides: How SEO and paid ads work together to supercharge dealership results

For auto dealerships, paid advertising is typically at the core of their digital marketing strategy and for good reason. It delivers effective results quickly with a clear way to track outcome. Unfortunately, dealerships with strong advertising campaigns often miss crucial SEO opportunities that could significantly amplify their results. 

By looking for synergy between all the digital marketing strategies available, dealers are finding more long lasting and cost-effective results.  

Marketing to maximize your resources  

The types of marketing and advertising tactics you use depend on your dealership’s goals and the resources you have available — not only money, but also time and talent. Paid ads and SEO leverage different types of resources, and they focus on earning different results: 

Digital advertising is targeted, precise, earns quick leads and requires a steady, ongoing financial investment. You can’t beat a well-placed advertisement when it comes to boosting sales and generating traceable leads with a clear ROI.  

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a long game focused on sustainable growth and increased brand authority. After initial setup, earning results with SEO can take weeks or months — but that same upfront investment can keep growing your local reputation and producing high-quality leads for years.  

Which one should you use—and when? 

Use digital ads when you need quick results and flexibility. Dealerships need to be able to pivot on a dime to push specific inventory or promote time-sensitive OEM incentives. Sometimes, these promotions only last a few days or hit mid-month, requiring fast action. And if you’re advertising 15 Toyota Tundras and you sell out, it’s critical to be able to halt ads quickly to avoid marketing (and paying to market) unavailable inventory. Paid ads enable real-time response to market shifts and competitor actions. 

Our digital marketing team typically starts with a four-campaign approach for new dealership clients: 

1. A local brand campaign focused on the dealership’s name and location. 
2. A make-focused campaign centered on the brands they’re selling. 
3. A dynamic campaign advertising new vehicle inventory. 
4. A dynamic campaign promoting the dealer’s preowned VINs

These campaigns are informed by real-time MarketAI intelligence and customized for each dealer based on local market factors, inventory and audience data.  

Leverage SEO when you want long-lasting growth and authentic credibility. Dealerships that want to emphasize their local community presence, broadcast their expertise and amplify brand awareness should lean into SEO for its cost-effective results and top-quality leads. SEO can help you establish your brand as a foundational and trustworthy local business that’s there whenever someone is looking. 

Our experts approach dealership SEO through strategic content creation: 

1. Building (or enhancing) unique landing pages for inventory and service categories. 
2. Localizing content for selected key markets. 
3. Optimizing around conversion goals, such as financing and lease offers for a specific vehicle model. 
4. Developing a local business listing to enhance appearance in search and maps. 

This SEO strategy prioritizes maintaining a consistent, accurate digital presence and providing helpful information that resonates with your target audience and builds trust. 

And what if you need both authority and agility? You can (and should) have it both ways by employing a holistic marketing strategy that leverages SEO and paid tactics in the combination that’s right for your dealership. 

Marketing synergy always wins 

The opposite qualities of different marketing approaches suggest a chasmic contrast — and danger (or at least frustration) for anyone who tries to cross it. But in reality, when SEO and paid advertising are used at the same time, they contribute deeply to each other’s successes and amplify a wide range of automotive business outcomes, resulting in both immediate and long-lasting ROI. 

It's not so much about trying to keep opposite strategies in perfect balance, which can lead to confusion and a constantly swinging pendulum. Instead, this relationship is a picture of brilliant synergy.  

Create marketing magic in key areas when your digital advertising and SEO work together:  

1. User retargeting. After capturing an organic lead with SEO, you can serve the user targeted paid advertisements across their digital journey to remind them about a specific vehicle or offering. Impression pixel-tracking provides transparency into the user’s conversion events and your ROI.
2. Better quality score = better ad placements. Strong website content developed with SEO best practices also improves your Google Quality Score, which affects your ad placements and cost per click. The quality score is “based on historical impressions” that SEO can influence; and that means using SEO not only increases general cost-effectiveness over time, but also directly affects the price and visibility of your paid efforts.
3. Double visibility, for free. When you leverage paid and organic tactics in tandem, the two can overlap powerfully. For example, by targeting the same keywords in your SEO and paid search campaigns, dealers can rank organically and display a sponsored result on the same search results page. This allows your dealership’s content to take up a significant amount of real estate above and below the fold.

Glimpse your automotive marketing future 

There’s no “ideal” ratio between SEO and paid advertising, and average marketing budgets can’t tell the whole story — not just because they’re averaged, but because money isn’t your only resource. However, there are ways you can build strategic interactions between paid and organic strategies to maximize your dollars, your minutes and your team’s talent. And you can form this strategy around data, not guesswork. 

Want to learn more? Our digital marketing experts can help you get started with a peek into your best marketing opportunities and provide a free 20-minute SEO audit for your dealership's website. 

Schedule your cost-free and pressure-free automotive marketing demo today.