With so many shoppers starting the car buying process online, you understand the importance of using SEO to drive traffic to your site. But what if you could use SEO to do even more? In this guide, you’ll learn smart strategies for using SEO to overcome common dealership challenges.
As a small, family-owned dealership in the competitive Southern California market, Downey Hyundai has always had to think creatively to bring in new customers and keep pace with competitors, which include two larger Hyundai dealerships close by. The collaborative, all-in-one approach to digital marketing has paid off.
For as long as businesses have been on the internet, they’ve been counting—and touting—their website traffic numbers. In the early days of e-commerce, more visits quickly became a proxy metric for more success.
As time went on, companies began to realize that more site visits did not necessarily translate to more sales. The reason is simple: not all digital traffic is quality digital traffic. When developing a digital marketing strategy, your dealership can learn from the mistakes of these early marketers by focusing on the right metrics and by trading in high numbers for healthy results.
How to Differentiate Traffic Quality
If you were forced to choose between low and high traffic volumes, it would be wise to choose the latter. And your dealership should aim to increase total traffic. But how can you tell whether the people visiting your site are in-market shoppers or simply passing the time?
Tracking a few additional, slightly more advanced metrics can help you determine what portion of your traffic adds value to your dealership. Website visitors tend to show true interest and even purchase intent by what they do after they’ve arrived on your site. Casual browsers bounce quickly while potential buyers take their time exploring your site.
To evaluate which kind of traffic you’re attracting, simply review average time on site and pages per visit. If most people are spending fewer than 30 seconds on your site and barely visiting more than a single page, you’re probably attracting the wrong kind of traffic.
Align Your Campaigns and Intended Audience
If your traffic is high but quality is low, your campaign creative, messaging, or targeting may not be resonating with your intended audience. To confirm that suspicion, check the click-through-rate on your campaigns and compare them to past campaigns and industry benchmarks. If you see low-quality traffic and a low click-through rate, it’s probably time to take a closer look at your campaigns.
One solution: start speaking to the audience you wish to attract. Work to develop consistent, cohesive campaign creative designed to engage your ideal customers and drive quality traffic to the website. While this might feel overwhelming for many dealers, partnering with professional graphic designers and campaign coordinators makes it easier to develop and deliver strategic, compelling campaigns. When selecting creative and strategic partners, be sure to screen for automotive knowledge and experience, which will help keep creative efforts aligned with your dealership’s strategy.
Evaluate, Iterate, and Engage
Great digital advertising isn’t about one campaign or one piece of creative – it’s an ongoing, iterative process. Follow up and review every campaign and piece of creative to ensure that they’re connecting with quality prospects. Remember, a successful digital strategy will drive more than just large traffic numbers. When you’re doing it right, you’ll see increases in engagement as demonstrated by more time on site, more pages per visit, more VDP views, and of course, more leads.
To learn more ways your dealership can adapt in a new age of automotive sales, check out our free eBook: 4 Questions to Improve Your Dealership’s Digital Marketing.
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It has been a whirlwind year for the automotive industry. In order to keep pace with change, consumers are adopting new ways of navigating the vehicle ownership cycle while keeping themselves and their families safe. Whether they’re in the market for a new vehicle or responding to automotive service marketing, your customers are completing more steps online. Is your digital marketing strategy prepared to handle this change, and is your team skilled enough to draw more shoppers to your Digital Storefront?
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can be a powerful tool to overcome some of your most persistent headaches. With 88% of shoppers starting the car buying process online, there is great potential to reach your target audience while they navigate search engine rankings. But it takes active management of this powerful digital marketing channel in order to make it successful. In other words, a “set it and forget it” approach won’t be enough to keep you on the first page of search results or satisfy the claim of a dealership customer retention plan.
Managing SEO can take a significant investment in time, effort and expertise to achieve its full potential and maximize returns for your dealership. Fortunately, Dealer.com employs a 100+ member team of trained automotive SEO and content experts who adapt to changing trends and best practices, so you don’t have to.
Want to know more about Dealer.com SEO, why it matters to your dealership, and ways in which it can be used? Keep reading for one example of how a common dealership sales challenge could be addressed with SEO, leading to more sales with minimal effort and investment.
The Challenge: Win over shoppers who are looking at competitive models.
Relying on a team of automotive SEO experts to maintain a more proactive, vigilant SEO strategy can give you the edge over your competition. Contact us today and let us help you identify opportunities to help you move more metal through the art and science of SEO.
By Dan Durick, Director of Dealer.com SEO
Coming through recent events feels a bit like we’ve time traveled. We stayed in our homes, like safe little time capsules, and emerged to a new world. In some ways, this world aligns with what we expected for the future, such as more shopping being done online – even in the automotive space. But in other ways it’s been more jarring, like the experience of social distancing, so re-opening dealerships will not be business as usual.
Let’s look at a couple ways that adjustments to business practices and consumer behavior will impact SEO strategies for sales and particularly service. We’re calling this shift “dealer home services,” as it encompasses everything your business can do away from the dealership, and in your customers’ homes.
The traditional need for being visible with phrases around vehicle models, car repair, parts, and the like remains, and now there’s a growing trend for phrases associated with buying online and shopping from home. Using Google Trends, we’re seeing an indication of increased search volume for “buy car online”.
While there are low points as we would expect through stay-at-home orders, the data through 5/16 shows a clear increase above previous highs over the past 12 months. Your SEO strategy should include tactics for capturing this traffic. Does your dealership website have a page that outlines how a customer can buy from you remotely? Do you communicate options for the customer to test drive and accept delivery of the vehicle? If not, that’s a great place to start to target these terms.
As you change your business practices, consider the content you are making to solve today’s challenges and how best to leverage online. There are countless sources for great content. For example, if you’re making a walkaround video for a potential customer, consider posting that to your blog and adding a link to the Vehicle Details Page. And while you’re there, create a second video with more general information about the model to place on your model landing page and your YouTube channel. Content is still a driving force of performance in SEO.
What people expect from fixed ops departments is changing. From experience, there’s pent-up demand for service – we have two cars waiting for oil changes and summer tires. A focus on service department marketing is critical, with additional landing page attention on how you protect both your customers and employees. On your service page, create an FAQ (marked up with schema, of course) to answer questions like: Do you offer contactless service? How often is your waiting area cleaned? How close are the seats? What about your loaner cars, are they sanitized? When you’re done with a customer’s car, do you disinfect it?
Consider what else should be communicated on your service page. Will you pick up a customer’s vehicle and deliver it? Are there services you can do remotely? Expect search volume for these kinds of terms to increase over time and optimizing your service pages for them will help capture that traffic and drive conversions.
Adjustments to your landing pages are important, but you also need to inform potential customers that are still on the search results page, before they even click on your link. Consider what space in your meta titles and descriptions you can allocate to messaging cleanliness and other precautionary measures or benefits of using your service department. Placing these terms in the title and descriptions of your service pages means Google’s users see them in the search results and will feel more confident doing business with you. When you make this change, monitor performance to understand impact of both rankings and click-throughs.
While we’re on the topic of the search results page, your Google My Business is also key to communicating to your audience. Leverage your business’ description to highlight the changes you’ve made to the benefit of your community (employees, customers). Also use Google Posts for the same.
Ensure you’ve created a separate Google My Business for your service center with accurate hours and connected it to your main GMB. Like your main, update the description and publish Posts. Focus on how your business is different today.
This is also a good time to update the photos on your GMBs. Show how clean your facility is, the space for customers to spread out from one another, and any hand sanitizer stations.
While your goal to sell cars and service your customers hasn’t changed, the market has. Things like transparent pricing on your service pages still positively impact conversions, but now you need to incorporate elements of safety. That’s a lot to cover in your service section, and while SEO is critical, make sure you have a thoughtful layout with engaging imagery to keep your visitors from bouncing.
Putting this all together, your brand is evolving. Adapt to the new market through updated business practices and take advantage of this through proper optimizations and page design. You’ll be rewarded when newly captured dealer home services traffic converts into new customers.
Of course, none of this is new. It’s been coming for years.
Google My Business (GMB) has long been one of Google’s key tools for business listings. A verified and well-managed GMB listing makes your dealership easier to find online, lets you engage with customers through messages and Q&A, helps support your advertising performance and can improve your search visibility.
But in addition to these benefits, recently Google took a pretty big step forward in making GMB significantly more valuable. That’s because Google My Business can also enable dealers to receive store visits reporting, which helps tie Google advertising directly to in-store visits. This combination represents a powerful marketing attribution tool to improve your presence online and measure the marketing impact to your dealerships.
But taking advantage of this opportunity requires a few steps, and comes with a few caveats. Here are the key things to know:
1. Store Visits is highly impactful, but you need a Verified GMB Account to be eligible for it.
Store Visits insights represents very powerful advertising attribution. It will help you make smarter advertising decisions, in addition to helping you continue to bridge the online to in-store consumer experience. That said, activating Store Visits depends entirely on your dealership actually having a verified GMB account. It’s well worth the effort to ensure your GMB account is set up properly. After verifying your GMB account, you’ll also need to let us know the account email that it’s verified under. We’ll link your GMB account to a Google advertising account.
2. Verifying your GMB account isn’t always simple, but there’s a lot of help available to guide you through it.
GMB account verification involves a few steps. For instance, as part of the process you’ll need to request that Google send you an old-fashioned post card as part containing a code that needs to be entered into an online portal. It can also be tricky to gain control of a GMB account even if your dealership already has one set up.But the process is worth it. For help, Dealer.com Managed Services teams are well versed in GMB and can walk you through each step, while also helping ensure you have an effective strategy around your GMB listing. This includes Managed Social to help you monitor and respond to Google Reviews and post content as well as Managed SEO which helps you create business descriptions within GMB, upload images and adjust business hours, and Managed Content & Creative to help ensure your current offers are updated. Even if you don’t work with Dealer.com Managed Services, Google also offers some convenient downloadable resources to help you. Here are our favorites:
3. Not every dealer will be immediately eligible for store visits.
Although you’ll become eligible for Store Visits with a verified GMB account, the verification process doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll get this new functionality right away. Google is rolling it out currently, and is promising that most dealerships will be eligible for Store Visits “soon.”
As a Google SMB Premier Partner, Dealer.com works with Google to ensure you can take full advantage of the advertising, search and social opportunities Google offers. New Store Visits offers the potential to see the value of these opportunities in a powerful new way. It’s well worth the effort to verify your GMB account.
For more, connect with us directly or download our best practices guide to Google My Business.
At this year’s SMX Advanced in Seattle I asked Google’s Gary Illyes if “hiding” content behind a Read More button affects websites’ SEO.
His answer wasn’t surprising considering Google’s stance on user experience. This practice, which essentially directs users to click a button/link that says Read More or Read On to view the full content, does have an effect on sites’ SEO, including auto retailers using Dealer.com Websites. Specifically, Google does not index content hidden behind these buttons on desktop sites.
This is an important distinction. Since Google currently uses the desktop version of a website as the primary source of content for its index, it impacts a site’s visibility in search results. Until Google launches its new Mobile First Index (sometime in 2018), Dealer.com recommends that dealers refrain from hiding any content on the desktop version of their websites.
Compared to mobile, desktop screens have real estate to spare. There’s no reason to save space by hiding content behind click for more buttons. If anything, it can seem a little deceptive, and doing so just puts websites at an SEO disadvantage since Google won’t use this hidden content to evaluate quality, no matter how relevant it is to the end user.
On the other hand, Read More buttons on mobile are completely acceptable since it actually makes the user experience better, according to Illyes. Just remember that Google isn’t yet indexing mobile devices first.
Here are my recommendations regarding this issue with Google’s current desktop indexing:
Comments? Questions? Reach me by commenting below. Thanks!
Pete Bruhn is the product manager – website platform at Dealer.com
*OEM restrictions may prevent you from doing this.
It’s not news that social media and SEO are invaluable to every dealership’s marketing strategy today. SEO has long been a critical element of search engine visibility, while social media, newer to the marketing scene, has become essential to a holistic digital strategy.
Perhaps what gets lost or continues to go unrecognized, however, is the increasingly important relationship between car dealer SEO and social media, how good content reaches far beyond social platforms, and that dealers need to think about an SEO and social strategy as one and the same.
While display and paid search advertising are designed to grab attention, SEO and social media, at least in this context, support brand visibility across traditional search engines and the social media platforms consumers are increasingly using to search for vehicles and dealerships.
Since it’s becoming more and more clear that one practice cannot succeed without the other, here are three ways a strong social media presence comprising high quality and frequently updated content that is informed by analytics can help your dealership’s search engine rankings improve.
Social media has become more than just general community interaction. Platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, even YouTube allow dealers to target potential car buyers based on demographics, keywords and geographical location. Just like local SEO strategy, social posts should target a highly specific set of qualified, in-market shoppers in your region.
It’s not enough to create content, hit the post or tweet button, and hope the right people will see the message. If you want to reach the right shoppers and continue to build a following, make sure you’re poring over your social data to determine the appropriate targeting strategy.
Here’s an exercise: do a Google search for one of your favorite major brands and chances are its Facebook page, for example, ranks somewhere not too far from the top organic listing. That’s because high-quality, relevant content has tremendous SEO value.
What’s high-quality, relevant content? It’s engaging, informative posts, tweets, articles, captioned photos, and videos that target a specific audience.
But don’t stop there. Great social media content also means linking to supporting webpages and writing using keywords and geographic terms that relate to your business. When that content also links to your dealership’s website, it may, for example, reinforce your onsite advertising efforts and integrate with your SEO strategy to help improve search engine results page (SERP) ranking.
And one more thing. Use #hashtags when relevant. While they don’t directly affect SEO ranking, timely hashtags tactically increase awareness and engagement of your social content. They’re both content filtering tools and, sometimes, a chance to expand your brand reach by joining onto something trending on the internet that might be useful to your marketing efforts.
Create content that promotes your dealership’s advertising strategy such as new vehicle launches, dealership events, comparison pages, and sales promotions. This content should always link shoppers to the website where the marketing initiatives are well detailed.
Speaking of links,
The search and social platforms we once thought as islands are now clearly part of one big digital ecosystem. The trick is to use each one effectively and with strategy interconnection so as to ensure you’re reaching as much of your target audience as possible without burning out on too much content generation. Stick to relevant content creation, one with applicable keywords, hashtags, and links, post frequently, and your dealership will be “buying” up more and more of that first SERP page real estate.
Bobby Bailey is the manager, Managed Social and Chris Nichols is the manager, SEO at Dealer.com
Before 2013, webmasters could log into Google Analytics to reveal every keyword that drove traffic to a site. Seeing the actual keywords, pages visitors landed on, and all the metrics about that page allowed for easy decision making. For SEO professionals particularly, it was the golden age of relevant keyword data.
In the fall of 2013, however, Google switched to its Secure Search, encrypting all searches and effectively cutting off the keyword data that website owners had come to rely on over the years.
So, what is a webmaster to do without organic keyword referral data? The good news is that there are still methods to glean some of this information once critical to car dealer SEO efforts. The best way to uncover effective keywords is to use the Search Analytics report found in the Search Console (formerly Google Webmaster Tools). Don’t be intimidated by the Search Console; it might look imposing at first, but it’s much easier to use than you think. Along the top you can select as many or as little data sets as you choose.
*Note: 28 days is the default date range. Order is based on number of clicks. These settings can be changed to fit your criteria.
To help you make sense of Search Analytics, let’s define some of the terms as they pertain to the report:
Queries – This is one of the last places Google allows webmasters to view the keywords users are typing in to search for a website. It’s limited in scope, but can help make strategic decisions. This section of the report allows you to refine queries by a given word and/or term. For instance, if you want to view how terms relating to used cars are performing simply open the filter and type “used.”
Impressions – Impressions are the number times a site has been shown to searchers.
Clicks – The number of people who have clicked on your site based on the search term used.
Click-Through Rate (CTR) – The amount of clicks divided by the number of impressions. For example, if there were 100 impressions and 25 clicks your CTR would be 25%.
Average Position – A calculation based on the number of search impressions and the ranking positions on a search engine. In one search a site could be at position five and in the next at position one, giving us an average position of three.
For details around a single phrase, simply click on the term “opening data,” which includes a line graph for the given time period.
Set the queries report 90-days out and export everything to a spreadsheet like Excel. Adding a filter to the top row will allow for easier sorting given there might be over 1,000 terms.
Separate terms by average position. Look at those sitting in positions 4-10 and again from 11-15. Those hovering at the top of page two may not take a ton of effort to push into the top 10 (page 1). Consider these low-hanging fruit.
Review the keywords, put them into groups, and check the estimated monthly search volume.
Run those in the 4-10 positions the same way. From here, assemble a plan of attack based on user data.
While it might take some familiarization, deciphering the data in Google’s Search Analytics report (it’s free, by the way) can be very beneficial to your dealership. It’ll help your business create a content strategy based on actual users’ searches, and not on the sort of educated assumptions made necessary since the demise of organic keyword referral data.
Chris Nichols is manager, SEO at Dealer.com
