When talking about how you should use SEO for your dealer website, there truly isn’t a one size fits all strategy. You’re going to have different goals from the next dealership and therefore the ways you achieve those goals through SEO will be different. You may want to bring more awareness to your dealership or maybe you want to highlight your SUVs. Both of these goals require a totally different SEO strategy. In this blog, we’ll go over 4 SEO secrets every car dealership should know about and use. 

Does My Dealership Need to do SEO?

The short answer is yes. If you want to be at all competitive in this market, you’re going to need to be using SEO. If you can create a well-oiled SEO machine, you will 100% see the results of your efforts. SEO can start with increasing the amount of traffic you get to your website and lead to higher conversion rates. We know most car buyers' journeys begin online, so if you have a solid SEO strategy, you’re more likely to attract more customers during the early stages of their journey. 

Secret #1: Ubersuggest

Ubersuggest was created by marketing legend Neil Patel. It’s a tool that helps companies with all things SEO from ensuring site health, to keyword research and competitor analysis. The best thing about it? There’s a free version that still provides a ton of useful information and if you do want the full version it’s an affordable $30 per month. This tool is incredibly useful for a number of reasons. First of all, it allows you to run an audit of your website to ensure your website is healthy and running smoothly. If there are any issues with particular pages or loading times, Ubersuggest will find them for you so you can make the necessary adjustments. It’s also an extremely powerful tool in the fact that it can provide you with the keywords you should be using more on your website in order to rank higher and more frequently in Google search results. 

Secret #2: Blogging 

If your dealership doesn’t have a blog, it’s time to look at starting one immediately. Even if you don’t have anyone working at your dealership who’s comfortable with writing them, hiring a freelance writer is very affordable and will pay for itself after a few months. Having a blog on your website does a bunch of great things for your company. The first thing it does is provide your customers with valuable information about everything automotive. People will use your blog as a resource when they’re looking for any information regarding buying or owning a car. This also increases the likelihood that people will finish reading a blog on your website and start browsing your site, potentially turning them into a customer. Blogging is also an amazing way to start ranking for particular keywords that will increase traffic to your website. Using tools like Ubersuggest, you can start focusing on using certain keywords in your blogs to not only increase traffic on your website but also bring more high-intent buyers to your site.

Secret #3: Google My Business

This one shouldn’t be a big secret to dealerships but if you’re not already listed on Google My Business, stop reading this blog and go create a listing. Your listing should have the name of your dealership, your hours, your location, and your phone number. One thing many people forget when creating a listing is adding the category of their business. Adding a category ensures that when people search for a car dealership in their area on Google that you show up on the results page. Another thing you should include in your listing is photos, the more the better. Show potential customers what to expect when they walk into your dealership and also help people who may struggle to locate your dealership by showing them an image of what it looks like from the road.  Lastly, the main thing you need to focus on when it comes to Google My Business is your customer reviews. Having positive reviews will help a ton with bringing in customers who are browsing your Google listing. While there’s no way to control if you get a negative review, there are ways to handle negative reviews. Rather than lashing out at a negative review, hear them out, address their concerns and offer to call them to try and remedy the situation. 

Secret #4: Customer Satisfaction is the Priority

Many businesses get so caught up in coming up with the best keywords and appeasing Google site crawlers that they forget about making their customer's journey as good as it can be. You could have a website that’s easy for Google crawlers and has high-ranking keywords on all of your pages but if you’re not providing your customers with a good online experience, it won’t count for anything.