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.
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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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.
