10 Tips for Local Automotive SEO

Car dealerships have a unique opportunity to attract more consumers to their locations, both online and physical, using local automotive SEO. How can yours do this?

Where do the pages from your website rank for the keywords used? Does your dealership come up on the first page of Google when searching for dealerships in your area? Are you holding the top position on some SERPS or somewhere near the bottom of the page? The closer your pages are to the top, the more likely you’ll be the dealership chosen by online users. Here are some tips to get your name at or near the top.

1. Does Your Website Make the Right First Impression?

More consumers than ever begin their search for anything online. We’ve become an at-home shopping society, which includes vehicles. During the pandemic, many car dealers found ways to sell cars with absolutely no person-to-person contact, and some of those practices continue today. If your website doesn’t tell the story of your company the right way, it needs to. Take a tour of your site and see how useful it can be. If you’re a bit blinded by the site, ask for some outside help assessing the quality of your site.

2. Where is Your Dealership?

You would think in 2022 that, we wouldn’t have to cover the need to claim the Google My Business page, but it’s still a challenge for some companies. Anyone can claim their page, and it helps online users find your location easily. This page contains all of the pertinent information to find your dealership to ensure a potential customer can buy a vehicle from you. Your physical location is one of the most important aspects of local automotive SEO.

3. Let Citations Add Credibility to Your Location

Various mentions of your business name and address on a website build the desired credibility in your community. This helps establish trust with search engines and potential customers. Using an aggregator tool, you can get more citations and push your pages up on the local SERPs. One of the top tools for this is Moz Local or Yext, which publishes your dealership’s details across several directory sites to ensure your Name, Address, and Phone number are listed consistently.

4. Analytics Tells You if Your Content is Working

When you build content to reach specific audiences and new consumers, the story is told in your Google Analytics. This tool can help you identify your most popular content, top landing pages, and top website referrals. If you’ve got several marketing campaigns going at once, this tool helps you understand which ones work the best. One of the best ways to see if your local automotive SEO is performing well is to review your Google Analytics at least once a week.

5. Your Website Must be Mobile Friendly

Another item we shouldn’t have to cover in 2022 is the usefulness of your website on mobile devices. More searches are being done using smartphones, tablets, and mobile devices than desktop devices. If your website is mobile friendly, it’s much easier for consumers to find your dealership and interact with your website. Your site should have been mobile friendly a long time ago, but if it’s not, now is the time to fix this glaring issue.

6. Include Location Based Pages in Your Content

Keywords might not be the king of SEO any longer, but they still drive the bus. When you want to be one of the top search results for the models sold in your area, you need to use keywords that include the city and state where you’re located. These tactics help you create location based pages using the make, model, city, and state together. Considering the number of dealerships in the country, you don’t need your content competing with the parent brand page. Improve your local automotive SEO with location based pages.

7. Stop Using Sliders on Your Home Page

Home Page Sliders are one of the most common features used on home pages for car dealership websites. This feature is outdated and useless to most consumers. Research found that most shoppers never click on the first slide or on the second one. Maybe they’re trying to read some of the content, and these sliders are only causing frustration because they keep moving. Delete sliders and carousels from your content and let it stand out from other car dealer content.

8. Most Consumers Use Reviews to Help Guide Their Journey

It doesn’t take very many reviews to create an opinion and choose to either take advantage of a product or service or not. As a car dealership, your consumers will buy cars from you infrequently, but they might come to your location for their regular service. Start with the purchase experience to harvest positive reviews and work to ensure your service team asks for good reviews from customers that have had positive experiences as well. The number of reviews and ratings show potential customers that your dealership is a location they can trust. Your online reviews are some of the most impactful aspects of local automotive SEO.

9. Link Up With Local Organizations both Online and In-Person

Authenticity is important to your local community, and seeing that you’re linked to local website and organizations for various reasons can help your visibility. The local links can be obtained through sponsorships of local youth sports leagues, community events, and various community participation from your team throughout the year. Another great way to get some local inbound links and connections is to host several community events at your dealership throughout the year.

10. How Useful is the Content on Your Site?

One of the most important aspects of local automotive SEO is to offer your audience useful content. This is where you get creative with how-to videos, pages that offer helpful hints, calendars of events, and community service events happening in your area. You can tell stories about vehicle safety, local businesses, and some of the unique features of the cars you sell in this content. If you approach the content from a problem solving perspective, you’re making it useful for part of your audience.