Automotive SEO Guide

Car dealers are known for loud commercials and aggressive marketing. While this seems like quite the negative stereotype, it reflects the competitive nature of the industry. Think of some television commercials you've seem for a dealership, and replace the cars with pharmaceuticals, clothes or baby food. Would you purchase these, or even visit the store? Probably not. This isn't a knock on dealerships, but raised to make a point: the competitive environment for car sales has created an atmosphere, which is almost expected, of extravagent, loud, and spectacular advertising for dealers. This has translated to dealer websites as well.

Proof? Sure, how many of your local car dealers have websites that are embedded with Flash? Have bold and bright colors? Have more style than substance? Does this get the message across that they sell cars? Sure. Does it aid in their search marketing? Certainly not.

Automotive SEO entails a good deal of upfront research. We can't buck-shot a map and target all the cities and towns we hit. We need to think about population size, competitors, travel constraints and demographics. For example, a person in Philadelphia is less likely to drive 100 miles to take a look at a new car than someone in Montana. And, in Philadelphia we'll find more competitors even within a single brand. This means keyword research becomes very important (though, one could argue, it always is...it's just heightened for car dealerships). We need to look at phrases used for search queries in a given region, and to do this we research a large number of towns, and get sales information from dealers regarding which municipalities they get business from.

Site analysis and optimization can, at times, be a challenge. If a site is Flash, proper SEO becomes more difficult. If a site is HTML based, great! At that point the consultant (or dealer if he or she is taking on this work) needs to plan out which pages of the site will target what keywords. Having a one-page Flash site obviously hampers this.

Internal linking should always be a concentration (again, internal linking is meaningless on a one-page site). Planning out strategic on-site, inter-page, links helps both search engines understand what pages on your site are the most important (your profit centers) and helps guide users to what they're actually looking for. It's not uncommon for a user to click the 'Back' button on the browser, return to the search engine, if they do not immediately find a way to get to what they are looking for on your site. Users tend not to investigate menus and sitemaps to find a product. They scan a page, and if they don't find it, they leave. This means grabbing their attentions is very important. Whether they're looking for a new or used car, parts or service, if they don't find it in just a few seconds you've likely lost your potential customer.

Used Cars. This tends to be a competitive phrase because typically every dealership sells used vehicles. A new Toyota store competes with all new and used car dealerships for this search phrase, along with sites like Cars.com and Yahoo Autos. Generally, a Toyota dealership doesn't just have used Toyota's, though that makes up the bulk of their pre-owned product. I recommend that along with "used cars" a dealership should also target "used" along with their franchise, "used toyota" for example. If a site has its inventory indexed by the search engines (which it should, if not the dealer needs to find a new website provider) it then becomes easier to successfully achieve rankings for long-tail searches like "used toyota camry" in their region. These phrases don't necessarily bring in a lot of traffic, but they are high-converters, helping raise ROI significantly.

Link Building. Link building for dealers can be a challenge as well. If a dealer has a solid marketing department then things like link bait become more possible. If not, trying to build links through interesting content takes a different turn. At that point try to stay on top of manufacturer news and trends. Create a blog and post about exciting news, include images and videos if possible. I can virtually guarantee if you're an Audi dealer and you got an R8 in (sure, it was probably special ordered well in advance) and you placed pictures of it on your blog, and embedded a YouTube video of it, you would have received some links. Better still, some of those links may have come from bloggers near your dealership. Local bloggers are a great group to try and target links from.

If link bait is not your thing, there are other possibilities. There are a few quality directories of car dealerships you can get a link on, and the Yellow Pages allows for a link with a fee.