Your auto dealer website can be one of your most viable long-term assets. It can be used to collect leads, generate interest in your vehicle inventory and even result in direct sales. Here are a few ways to help increase your site’s online visibility and generate more sales.
Speed Up Your Website
According to Umass Amherst, visitors are willing to wait just 2 second for a page to load before leaving. Having a fast loading site is imperative in order to keep visitors on your site. A slow loading site may also affect the bounce rate, which some experts believe may ultimately affect search engine rankings.
Pick a reliable host with a history of solid up-time and service. If your auto dealer site runs on WordPress you can utilize numerous plug-ins in order to maximize load times. A caching plug-in saves your site’s html files and serves them from the cache instead of loading data from scratch. A minifying plug-in reduces load times by compressing files.
Optimize On-Page Elements
In order for your site to perform well in the search engines you’ll need to optimize on-page site elements such as H1’s and title tags. Meta descriptions are no longer a ranking factor but should be crafted to be compelling and encourage clickthrough’s. For example, you could mention current available specials and low pricing available at your dealership in order to appeal to prospective auto shoppers.
You’ll also want to make sure that your content delivers when the surfer clicks through to your site. If you mention available vehicle specials in your meta description the content should reflect that. Misleading meta descriptions will undoubtedly affect the bounce rate and user experience.
Adding modifiers to your title tag such as “2017” or “specials” can help you rank for long tail versions of your primary keyword. Leverage SEO friendly URL’s incorporating relevant keywords. If your site runs on WordPress you can go to “Settings” in the left hand column in order to adjust permalink settings from “default” to “post name”.
Adding internal links to relevant pages or posts on your site can help to spread link juice and increase the user experience on your site.
Build Content Around LSI Keywords
Site content should be optimized around your primary keyword in addition to relevant LSI keywords (latent semantic indexing). These keywords are not necessarily synonyms but simply keywords that are closely related together. Google’s Keyword Planner is an excellent free tool that makes it easy to find relevant LSI keywords.
For example, a page focusing on used vehicles for sale could include the keywords “pre-owned” and “used car specials”. Utilizing relevant LSI keywords enables Google to understand your content better plus you’re more likely to rank for a larger number of keywords which means more traffic.
Implement Auto Dealer Schema Code
Schema markup code should be added to all relevant pages in order to tell the search engines what your data means. Schema markup was created to show surfers what a site is about directly in the SERP’s. Auto dealer schema code includes the page url, product, pricing and location. This code can be added via Google’s Webmaster Tools or by inserting javascript directly into your site’s html code.
Google’s John Mueller has confirmed structured data markup not be a ranking factor. However, it’s still important to to implement schema code on your site because it helps Google index and understand your content. It may also increase the chances of your content being displayed as a rich snippet and these generally tend to get a higher click-through rate in the SERP’s.
Make Your Content Scannable
Nielsen Norman Group reports that 79% of online visitors scan the page while just 16% read articles word by word. You only have a small window of opportunity to grab your visitor’s attention and motivate them to read further.
Make your content more user-friendly and readable by using subheadings, lists and bullet points. Using subheadings makes it easier for readers to jump to the section that interests them most. Use whitespace to organize and break up large blocks of text which can look intimidating. Bold and italicized text can be used in order to highlight important facts.
Build Out More Pages
Generate more traffic by building out dealer pages targeting the nearest cities surrounding your car dealership. If you’re in a small town you may want to target the nearest largest city. Additional pages can be built to target specific keywords such as “used trucks + city” or “used car dealer+city”. Building out new pages makes it possible to expand audience reach and should eventually increase organic traffic.
Getting all of these on-page factors optimize will certainly take time and effort but the end result is more traffic which ultimately means more auto sales and leads for your dealership.