With so many potential car dealership customers starting their buying journey online, it's essential to have a strong online presence. For car dealers, prioritizing the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) of their website greatly impacts their visibility amongst organic search results, maximizing sales opportunities.
Why SEO Matters for Dealerships
SEO is the practice of enhancing a website to increase its visibility for relevant searches. The higher the website's pages rank in search results, the more likely they are to attract attention and drive high-quality site traffic. Here's why a targeted SEO strategy is important for dealers:
- Organic Traffic: Over 33% of dealer site traffic comes through the organic channel. By optimizing their website for search engines, dealers can increase this traffic without paying for ads.
- High and Low Funnel Searches: In high funnel marketing, dealerships enhance visibility by optimizing SEO for broad, informational queries from potential car buyers exploring options early in their purchasing journey. Low funnel marketing focuses on transactional keywords that cater directly to potential customers ready to make a purchase decision.
By understanding and optimizing for both high and low funnel searches, automotive dealers can effectively attract potential buyers at every stage of their journey, ultimately guiding them from initial research to making a purchase.
- Growing Audience: By improving search results and incorporating relevant keywords into their websites, dealerships can increase the likelihood that search engines will feature their content and drive more high-quality leads.
Identifying the Need for SEO Improvements
How can you tell if your dealership needs to improve its SEO? A two-pronged approach is necessary: examining both on-site and off-site factors.
- On-Site Factors:
- Content: Ensure that your on-site content, URL structures, and site architecture are effectively communicating with search engine bots and have optimized metadata. High-quality, evergreen content that stays relevant over time and answers potential customers' queries are key.
- User Experience: The structure of your site should provide a positive user experience. A well-organized site encourages engagement and boosts organic rankings. Make your content compelling to facilitate easy and contextualized information to make it easier for search engines to navigate and find the site.
- Off-Site Factors:
- Local Listings: Your Google Business Profile and other local listings are critical. Your profile should accurately reflect your business to improve your local presence and ensure that local searchers find your dealership easily.
- Consistency: Google needs to be able to consistently find your dealership. Regularly updating your listings and ensuring NAP (Name, Address, Phone number) accuracy across all platforms is essential.
How ZeroSum Can Enhance Your SEO
ZeroSum specializes in helping dealerships maximize their online visibility through targeted SEO strategies:
- Keyword Analysis: We analyze a dealership’s current ranking and identify the keywords that should be targeted. This ensures that content is aligned with what potential customers are searching for.
- Optimized Landing Pages: ZeroSum can build landing pages optimized for relevancy and identified keywords, increasing a dealer’s chance of ranking higher in Google search results.
- Comprehensive Strategy: ZeroSum’s approach considers both on-site and off-site factors, ensuring a holistic SEO strategy that covers all bases. We emphasize unique high-quality content that encourages referral traffic, smart and strong internal linking, good site organization, and more to create an SEO strategy that supports your overall marketing mix.
- Local SEO: Ensure your Google Business Profile is accurate and up-to-date, as it is often the first point of contact for users searching for your business. Feature your business in local directories by utilizing aggregation platforms like Yelp to share information about your business and build a reliable online reputation.
By partnering with ZeroSum, dealers can ensure that their online presence not only improves, but also organically attracts more potential buyers. Don’t let the competition outrank you—invest in SEO and drive more traffic to your digital lot.