SEO Tips for Car Dealers Looking Ahead

Google+ has been promoted lately by many in the SEO industry as a "must-do" for local businesses to help their search engine optimization efforts. While an important tool for SEO moving forward, there are other areas your dealership can utilize to keep your search engine optimization on the cutting edge.

Here are a couple of additional things your car dealership should be keeping an eye on to keep your SEO efforts top-notch as the search landscape continues to change:

Monitor Your Best Referral Sites: Check your Google Analytics for the third party sites that are sending quality traffic to your site. This means it is traffic that converts into leads, and eventually sales. It could be local sites, social media portals, or even your third party lead providers. Keep track of this information and nurture those sites (and your relationship with them).

Generate Quality Content: Good content is good content, regardless of which platform you put it on. That means it's important to make the content your dealership produces "shareable" to other platforms. One way this can be done is to make sure you have social media sharing buttons on your blog. Also, create content with your SEO keywords in mind in case they do get shared and spread through the Internet.

Mobile Technology: Mobile is big and getting bigger! Its roughly 20% of a typical dealer’s traffic right now, and growing every month! Find out what your consumers want by taking every opportunity to survey them -- ask for suggestions in your newsletters, converse with them via social media, and track the existing mobile traffic to your site through analytics. Right now is the time to ensure your mobile site is properly search optimized so your dealership doesn't get left behind in the future.

Google+ is just one of many SEO extras your dealership should be focusing on moving forward. Once your car dealer website is properly optimized, make sure your dealership or SEO provider is engaging search engines through as many mediums as possible.

Tags: Best, Car Dealer, Dealer Website, Practices, SEO

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Comment by Andrew Compton on February 27, 2012 at 1:30pm: Your post are always educational and the insights of being in the trenches everyday for your dealers makes you a true dealer advocate.

Comment by Ali Amirrezvani on February 27, 2012 at 11:55am: So glad this post has been helpful to John, Ralph, and all else that have read it. Kevin--huge compliment. We strive to be an advocate for our dealers, and appreciate the kind words!

Comment by John Jones on February 27, 2012 at 9:46am: Very well said Kevin and great post Ali,

With the ramp up of G+ I think it's important now more than ever to remember our SEO strategies and best practices. Recognizing the weight google has put on places and reviews the misconception I am constantly seeing are efforts solely focused to that one area. In reality our efforts should remain a holistic approach with our SEO, Places/Reviews, PPC and now Google + top of mind. Thinking of google as an ocean, the more hooks we have in that ocean, the more likely we are going to pull searches off the SERP pages and onto our websites. Thank you for reminding our community of some solid SEO steps Ali.

Comment by kevinkelly.it on February 26, 2012 at 10:54am

Two points. first, if you look at the hundreds of vendors serving dealers, I would put them into four catagories:

Leaches - these are the vendors that just want your money and will go to any length to get it, including illegally. I think many would be surprised how many major dealership vendors fall into this category. The day is coming when I will name these.
Equal revenue generators - the majority fall into this category, they will help you make more revenue, but can only bring you up to the level of the other dealerships they service.
Partners - vendors who live by making dealerships successful, they truly believe the more successful they make a dealership, the more successful they will be. Many vendors call themselves partners, few actually do it.
Advocates - These are the Navy Seal team of vendors. They fight for the dealerships 24/7, they do everything possible for your success, especially when the obstacle is dealership management. In my opinion you are looking at Superman Jim Ziegler, Ralph Paglia, Brian Pasch and a few others. Ali and his DealerOn team are truly focusing on moving from partner to Advocate as this post shows.

All that said, in the SEO world, never forget that the goal is optimizing your Google page rank. The ever changing Google algo (algorithm) for page rank is influenced by what we used to call citations. That has changed dramatically in 2011, as Google gets better and better at finding quality content over some of the tricks used in SEO. Google + role in determining organic page ranking cannot be over stated. It is not the only tool in your SEO toolbox, however, by June 2012 it will be the best tool you have. Can't emphasize strongly enough that content is KING, the higher quality of content in your web site, the better your organic page ranking.

Comment by Ralph Paglia on February 26, 2012 at 10:09am: Ali - Thank you for several very effective SEO practices, and for reminding us to not be seduced by the "next silver bullet"... Yes, Google+ is an important SEO practice, but it should be executed at the expense of many other highly effective measures and implementations, such as the few you suggested in your article.

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