If you have a car dealership business and want to increase your online presence, you have landed at the right SEO guide. As per the data, 95 percent of automobile buyers refer to online information before purchasing a vehicle. Here are some amazing facts related to online research for the automobile industry.

Your potential customers spend around 60% of their time online research before buying a car. Top Five online activities of a person before buying a car are:

• Researching vehicle costs
• Finding actual vehicle listed up for sale 
• Comparing features of different models 
• Finding the worth of current vehicle
• Finding a car dealer

In this age, where online has become a part of your customer life, SEO for the automobile industry has become crucial for your business to grow fruitfully. However, it is not that simple a strategy to crack. But don’t worry, we are here to help you. 

Best SEO tips for Car Dealership

Now that you know the importance of SEO in the automobile business, let us see how to create and implement a successful SEO plan for car dealers. 

Here are some of the best SEO strategies for car dealerships that we will be discussing in this article:

• Understand your Target Customer
• Keyword Research and Planning for Car Dealership
• Creating content for automobile SEO
• Off-page SEO for automobile
• Local SEO for the automobile industry

Automobile SEO: Understand your Target Customer

Suppose if your customer is interested in buying a new car, he or she will first know the various features they should analyze and check before making the decision. 

The next thing they will probably search for is which car company is the best under their budget(in case they don’t have a clear brand preference). They will visit the websites of various vehicle companies, and look at the models, their features, and special discount offers. Further, they will check online reviews on other blogs, YouTube, Reddit, or other social media platforms. Once they are pretty much clear about their choice, they will head towards your physical store. 

All in all, there are four phases of your buyer online journey:

Awareness phase: 

In this phase, the buyer has a problem which may be anything, for example, the need to own a bigger vehicle to accommodate family on the trip. In this phase, the buyer will search online to better understand their problem, wants, or needs.

Consideration Phase: 

In this phase, the buyer has a clear picture of their problem. He or she simply knows what it is that they want, desire, or need a solution to. Now, they will search for that only: the solution to their problem and compare options.

Decision Phase:

In this phase, they have finally made up their mind to purchase a new car that will have better accommodation for their family trips. In this stage, they will look at financing issues and visit your store. 

Retention Phase: 

This stage is often termed as the loyalty stage. The customer has now made an approach but that does not mean that they are out of your attention radar. You must always try to follow up and build up your bonds. Remember that happy customers bring in more revenue.

If you, as a car dealer, understand the buyer persona of your potential customers and create a solid digital marketing plan according to every stage of your buyer, you will reap golden benefits in your business.

Keyword Research and Planning for Car Dealership

A successful SEO strategy for a car dealership starts with a well-researched and planned keyword strategy. This is where a thorough understanding of your buyer behavior will help you a lot. Keywords are basically the search queries that your user uses while searching for a car dealership on the internet. Now you just have to use these keywords in your website content so that Google can understand that you offer the service people look for while searching for car dealership queries. 

How to do keyword research and planning for a car dealership business ?

Here are some relevant SEO tips for car dealerships are as follows:

1. Research the key terms your audience is using and understand the intent behind it. For keyword research, you can use mainly three methods:

• Understand the user behavior
• Use the Google search page
• Take help from keyword research tools.

The usage of customer behavior has already been explained. Now let us explain how we can use Google search page for keyword research.

Google is a user-centric company and it ranks the content as per their relevance to the search query. Not only that, it helps you understand what your target market is searching for on the web. But how? We are sure you might have used the following features of the Google algorithm:

• Google autocomplete feature
• Related search options
• People also ask for column

Now all you have to do is pay close attention to what Google is suggesting for a particular keyword you type in the search box. For example, if you write, “best car dealer in New York”, here are some autocomplete feature suggestions:

• best car dealership in New York
• Biggest car dealer in New York
• Biggest Ford dealer in New York
• Biggest Ford dealer in New York State
• Largest car dealer in New York
• Luxury car dealerships in New York

These are a few other search queries of someone who is interested in searching for car dealerships in New York City. Further, if you analyze the Google search result page, you will see the following related searches:

• best used car dealerships in New York 
• used car dealers in New York 
• car dealerships NYC 
• car dealerships manhattan 
• used cars for sale under $5,000 in New York 
• car dealerships in New Jersey 
• car dealerships queens 
• car dealerships Brooklyn

By analyzing Google, you will know what car dealership exactly interests your audience. 

The second method to do keyword research is by using keyword research tools such as Google Keyword Planner, Ubersuggest, ahrefs, and Semrush(to name a few of the best ones). 

These tools come with an added advantage, as they will also give you information about the search volume, keyword difficulty, and user search intent(the one we discussed in the buyer persona).

Suppose you are using Ubersuggest. Your search for the term “best car dealer in New York”, it will show you the following details:

Search volume: 210

Keyword difficulty: 50

Paid Difficulty: 26

Cost Per Click or CPC: $3.88

Further, these are some keyword suggestions for the searched keywords:

• how to get the best deal on a new car 
• largest used car dealer in NJ
• biggest Ford dealer in New York state
• best used car dealers in New York
• largest car dealer in New York 
• how to afford a car in NYC
• luxury car dealerships in New York 
• best car in New York 
• best car dealer in New Jersey 

2. The other important metric to analyze is the user search intent behind the keywords. Generally speaking, there are four types of user search intent, these are explained as follows:

•  Navigational: Your user wants to visit a particular website.

Eg:cardealer.com

• Transactional: Here the user wants to buy a car or service or complete an action.

Eg: buy the best luxury car

• Informational: The user wants to get more information about a particular topic related to cars.  

Eg: How to choose the best car 

• Commercial: The user is confused between choices and wants to compare them to make a decision

Eg: Mercedes vs BMW

3. Once you are done with the keyword research, try incorporating them naturally into your website content. Place them strategically in your title, headings, meta tags, image alt text, description, etc. Remember, you have to do it in a seamless manner else Google will catch the keyword stuffing issue in your website and de-rank it.

Creating content for automobile SEO

When you are in an online business or doing online marketing for your business, you cannot afford to miss out on creating quality content. It is because when it comes to online space, content is everything, right from your receptionist and salesperson to manager. That is how important it is for your business. One name with many roles. 

How to create quality content for automobile SEO ?

Here are some of the best tips for creating content for card dealership SEO:

1. Write informative and engaging high-quality content on your website. Remember that your content should be original, and plagiarism-free, and answer the queries of your potential customers.
2. Add CTAs such as “Book a test Drive” or “Visit our showroom”, etc.
3. Write a compelling headline that catches the attention of your clients. Plus, divide your content into small paragraphs and try to use active voice, table, and bullet points. 
4. Avoid using too many jargon or complex words. Though you must tell every information about the car’s features right from mileage to speed, explain them in simple words. If possible, you can also create a separate blog to explain the meaning of these features. 
5. Some of the blog topic ideas for car dealerships are as follows:

• Car buying tips
• Automotive industry news
• Blog post promotion
• Automotive terminology 
• Car trivia 
• Customer testimonials 
• Event posts 
• You can write about your employees 
• Car leasing topics
• Company updates in the form of a press release
• Dealership News 
• Deals and promotions 
• DIY tutorials where you might teach how to customize the vehicle
• Facility Tours 
• Local topics of interest such as the best car for a particular region
• New car announcements 
• Opinion poll 
• Seasonal car tips 
• Share related content 
• Vehicle tutorials

Off-page SEO for automobile

Off-page strategies include the optimization that is done outside our website that has a direct impact on your SEO ranking. Backlinks form an integral part of a successful SEO for car dealerships. Backlinks are the links on other relevant websites that link back to yours. A good example of a successful backlinks profile is Wikipedia. This is one of the reasons why Wikipedia has a high SEO ranking.

How to get quality backlinks for the car dealership business ?

Some of the best page strategies to build a high-quality backlink profile for car dealers are as follows:

1. Create shareable content as it is the most cost-effective way of getting backlinks. If you want to buy backlinks, this would turn out to be a costly strategy for you. However, creating high-quality content that other websites want to link to is one of the best ways to get backlinks.
2. Write guest posts on other relevant high-domain authority websites. 
3. Participate in online interviews, podcasts, and online car enthusiast communities. 

Local SEO for a Car Dealership

Suppose you have a car dealership business in New Jersey, then tell us who is more likely to come to your showroom, take a test drive, and finally buy the car. Will it be a person from Miami or a person from New Jersey? The person in New Jersey has a high chance of visiting your store, buying a car, or asking you to repair the old car. Therefore, while you focus on the needs of your potential customer, you must not forget that in a business like yours, demographics play an important role. All in all, you must focus on Local SEO for car dealerships.

How can we do local SEO for the car dealership business ?

The relevant local SEO tips for the automobile industry are as follows:

1. Create a fully optimized Google My Business profile. If you have a local business like a car dealership and you are not using Google My Business listing, then we must say you are already losing out on a lot of customer base in your city. It’s time you create your profile and add all the details or if you have already created one, tick off the information given below:

• Business name
• Working hours
• Phone number
• Address
• Images
• A well keyword-optimized description.

2. Just like Google My Business, there are several other online directories that you can take advantage of. Refer to the following sites for the same:

• Cars for Sale
• Car.com
• Just Good Car
• Classic Cars

3. Make sure to add the correct address and contact details on all of your online listings. Plus, adding a map to your website will also do good.

Other SEO tips for the Automobile Industry

Some other SEO tips for car dealership are as follows:

1. The webpages on your car dealership website should be easily navigable and customers should face no problem in interacting with your website. For this, make separate pages for various categories and make your website visually appealing. 
2. Make your car dealership website screen responsive as the majority of your potential buyers will use mobile devices or tablets to visit your website.

This covers SEO guides for car dealerships. If you want more information or have a query, feel free to contact us for the same.