It’s a weird time to be a car dealer. Shutdowns, reopens, high demand, supply chain issues, low inventory, unprecedented used vehicle profits and competition, phew, that’s a lot to keep up with today! This change can give a dealer whiplash trying to race to keep up and predict what to do to get ahead of the next sweeping change. Today let’s take a step back, take a cleansing breath.

Let’s focus on automotive SEO activities that can help your dealership in the short and long term. SEO or search engine optimization, is likely not a foreign term to your dealership. However, is it something you actively manage and measure?

If you’re one of the dealers currently rolling your eyes thinking, I already have an SEO solution for my dealership, next—hold up! All SEO strategies are not created equal. If SEO is just something you throw money at and assume it’s properly managed, you need to take a closer look.

There are hundreds of SEO vendors and “SEO guys” out there, but if you aren’t having recurring meetings and reporting that shows what they are doing for you and how it helped your dealership’s organic traffic performance, that’s a red flag. Let’s dive deeper into what a quality SEO strategy looks like for dealers.

Local SEO & Google Business Profile Optimization

One of the fastest and most effective ways to get organic value is with local SEO efforts. A few areas to focus on include:

• Is your Google Business Profile fully optimized?
• Are your profile’s website button and CTA links tagged properly to track clicks?
• Do you have phone tracking activated so you can monitor your call activity?
• Are you using Google Business Profiles for your service and parts profiles?
• Consistent NAP details (business name, address, phone number) on your website, online profiles, and directories (i.e. website header and footer, contact page, Google Business Profile, Facebook page, Bing Places, Yelp, etc.)

You can learn more about how to improve your local search visibility in our Ultimate Guide to Google My Business Ebook here.

Best Practices for On-Site Automotive SEO

Organic traffic is almost always the largest traffic channel on dealer websites. Even if this is already your largest channel, that doesn’t mean there isn’t more you can do to improve the quality of traffic and conversion potential. Let’s go over some core activities to focus on.

1. Focus on transactional and commercial keywords

All keywords are not created equal. Our first on-site SEO tip focuses on transactional keywords rather than informational ones.

A transactional keyword is something that a shopper with high buying intent would search for, such as “Honda lease prices”. On the other hand, an informational keyword would be something less intent focused and more educational, like “programming Honda key fob”.

The transactional keywords should be a higher priority because they typically attract local shoppers who you can actually do business with. Informational keywords don’t necessarily imply “local” so you can’t be sure you’ll reach shoppers in your area.

For example, Dealer Teamwork works with a BMW dealer in CA that was ranking for the term “what does BMW stand for”. Upon analyzing traffic, most was coming from the East Coast, it had a high bounce rate, and it was not converting. This type of traffic was of no use to that dealer, so we helped them optimize for transactional keywords with greater buying intent.

Another type of keyword to prioritize is commercial. Commercial keywords are things like make / model keywords, i.e. Honda Accord.

2. Clean & organize website navigation

When optimizing your website navigation, start with a user-first approach. If it’s pleasing to users, it’ll likely pay off in SEO benefits as well. A clean and organized website navigation makes it easier for shoppers to find what they want, which also makes it easier for search engines to crawl and index your site.

If you’re looking for a few quick-tips to optimize your website navigation, check out this video. It covers:

• Removing low traffic pages from nav
• Eliminating duplicate pages
• Keeping top-level nav simple
• Keeping sub-nav simple
• Considering mobile experience

3. Link relevant pages

Our third SEO tip is to link relevant pages to each other throughout your website. This shows search engines that those pages are related and important, and it helps search engines better understand your website. You can do this by hyperlinking page content to the relevant page on your site that it pertains to.

For example, if you have a page with offers on used vehicles, link to your finance application when you talk about getting pre-qualified for the vehicle. Another example, if you have a page that highlights current recalls your dealership can help consumers with, link to your service page so owners can easily schedule an appointment to get the recall work done.

4. Fix technical SEO errors

Fixing technical SEO errors can be a major undertaking, and sometimes there are elements that you cannot modify without the help of your website provider. Here are some technical SEO errors to keep an eye out for, that you likely can repair on your own:

• Fix or eliminate broken pages, i.e. a page might break if there are errors in the code or scripts running on your page. If you can’t fix it on your own and can’t eliminate the page, ask your web provider for assistance.
• Fix broken links, i.e. 404 errors. If you removed a page or changed the URL, redirect the old page to the new page or another relevant page on your site.
• Fix duplicate page titles. If you’re organizing your website content properly, there should be no need for pages with the same title. Consolidate content or differentiate the pages so that the titles can be unique.
• Add page headings if they are missing. At the very least, your page should have an H1 heading (the main heading of the page). If you have other page sections, they should be formatted as the other heading types in outline order (i.e. H1, H2, H3, and so on depending on the content structure).

You can identify technical errors by running a website audit, but take the results with a grain of salt. We’ll explain how to consume automated website audit content in more detail in the last section of this article. There are many free tools out there, but Dealer Teamwork can conduct a more thorough, complimentary website audit as well. Request your in-depth website audit here.

5. Craft a meaningful measurement approach

One of the most important elements of a successful SEO strategy is often ignored—developing a way to measure your efforts. Measurement involves defining KPIs, setting goals, reporting, and analyzing results.

If you don’t know where to start, take this example. Our Enhanced SEO team at Dealer Teamwork measures metrics such as these:

• Number of pages created
• Number of technical issues identified & fixed
• Organic keyword ranking improvement for target keywords
• Outcomes from organic traffic

Number of pages created

All pages are not created equal, so you should be aware of how many pages are being added and updated on a regular basis, as well as the topics of focus. “Number of pages” isn’t a KPI, it’s instead something your SEO team or vendor should be tracking and reporting on regularly.

As new pages are created, make sure they are dedicated to or tie back to “transactional” or “commercial” topics, rather than solely focusing on “informational” topics. Think of the first best practice mentioned above.

Take this example, a Honda dealer came to us with concerns over an extremely high bounce rate. Our team looked at their top traffic pages and noticed 7 out of the top 10 were purely informational, for example a page dedicated to “the difference between premium and regular gasoline”.

Digging in further, we found that traffic was bouncing as high as 90% on these pages, and a majority of traffic was coming from the Midwest and East Coast. The traffic was well outside their target market, it was bouncing high, and it was not converting.

To repair this issue, a dealer could eliminate the page or optimize it for more local traffic and conversions. Some optimizations included:

• Including city and state in the page title/headings
• Adding more content linking back to make/model pages (i.e. XYZ models perform best with premium gasoline and ABC models with regular)
• Adding CTAs to drive more conversions

Informational pages can have a place if built properly, but dead-end pages should be eliminated. Even if a customer spent 5 minutes on the page before leaving the site, it still registers as a bounce, especially if there is nothing else to do after consuming the information. That’s why related content with internal links and CTAs are so important.

Number of technical issues identified & fixed

Again, this metric isn’t a KPI, but rather something your SEO team or vendor should measure and track. This metric will help you see how much work is being done on a regular basis. Also, it gives you an opportunity to dive deeper and see what type of work is being done to ensure it’s making an impact.

The more issues, errors, and warnings that can be addressed, the better your site will perform. Better quality content, structured in a way that search engines can understand, provides both a good experience to the user and to search engines. Sites with this good structure and behavioral signals are rewarded with better ranking in organic search.

Organic keyword ranking improvement for target keywords

As previously mentioned, all keywords are not created equal. Keyword ranking improvements are often reported on in general or with overall metrics, and then the insight stops there.

A sound SEO strategy involves prioritizing and going after keywords that will help you reach your audience and drive desired outcomes once they get to your site. The value of an informational keyword is not the same as the value of a transactional keyword. Make sure you understand which keywords you are going after, and make sure they are driving quality traffic.

Outcomes from organic traffic

A great way to judge whether or not you are driving quality traffic for transactional or commercial keywords is to measure the outcomes of your organic traffic. Some keywords will be aiming to drive high to mid-funnel traffic to your website, but let’s focus on low-funnel traffic goals.

Some outcomes to track include:

• Website phone calls, forms, chats from organic traffic
• Google Business Profile driving directions requests, calls, website clicks
• Cars for Sale phone calls and clicks to the website

Beware of Scare Tactics

The last topic we will cover today involves being aware of red flags so you can avoid them. Some red flags we’ve already discussed include:

• Not having regular meetings or reporting on progress
• Confusing, vague, or overly generalized reporting
• Lack of focus with the keyword and content strategy
• Lack of transparency for work being completed each month

A final red flag that we haven’t yet discussed relates to automatically generated SEO audits. Often, an SEO vendor sends out a cold-email mentioning terrible results from an SEO audit on your site or offers a free SEO audit to hook you into their services.

A lot of time these audits are automatically generated, which isn’t a bad thing on it’s own. However, it’s important to be educated on what these reports are actually telling you.

Almost all, if not all sites will have issues, errors, and warnings flagged by these auto-generated reports. In a perfect world, you’d fix all of these potential problems and have an A+ site. Unfortunately, many websites will never have a perfect score because of limitations of the website platform being used.

For example, if your website platform doesn’t include alt text for every image on your site, like inventory images, you’ll get errors flagged for all of those images. You have thousands of these types of images on your site, and missing alt text is likely a system limitation in this instance. You can reach out to your website provider to try to repair these issues, however, they may not have a solution for you in the short or long term.

Take that example a bit further. Let’s say an SEO provider reaches out to you saying you have thousands of errors on your site. Make sure when you receive those automated audits, you can see what the errors are so you can see if the errors are things you can reasonably fix. A great way to understand the quality of an SEO provider’s offering is to ask them how many of those errors their service would fix for you.

As previously mentioned, Dealer Teamwork offers complimentary website audits, you can request one here. However, we customize your audit and highlight issues that can reasonably be corrected and prioritize corrections that will have the biggest impact on your SEO performance.

Our biggest recommendations for addressing this red flag are to take automated audits with a grain of salt, request context for the issues being flagged, and request more information on how the SEO provider is going to address all these issues if you work with them.

Contact us if you need help understanding issues generated by this type of report, or if you want to learn more about how Dealer Teamwork can help your dealership.