JAZEL AUTO BLOG

SEO is the silent champion of successful dealerships. Though often considered “behind the scenes,” SEO is a powerhouse of online marketing – chugging away 24/7 to keep you at the top of the page. 

Except when you’re not at the top of the page… And you don’t have any featured snippets… And your traffic is dropping… 

Sounds like you’ve got: 

Dealership Website Problem #8: So-So SEO 

Sometimes, you realize your dealership has slipped in the rankings. It happens. Competition is fierce, and SEO is constantly changing. The problem is, the more frequently you slip, the harder it is to keep your grip on those all-important top spots. 

When you find yourself in such a situation, it’s usually due to a combination of factors, with one predominant problem, often falling into one of the following categories. 

“Never Quite #1”: 

Constantly checking to see if your site is top of the search results? Many dealers find themselves regularly engaging in intense SEO and advertising campaigns, only to be rewarded with a few days in the spotlight before slipping back down the rankings.  

If you’ve begun to resign yourself to the 2nd, 3rd, or even 4th spot (“My competitor is just too big/rich/established to oust!”), it is time to get help with your SEO situation. 

Not Enough Time: 

There are more than a few dealers (and agencies, believe it or not), that don’t have the time or manpower to adequately service the SEO requirements of the sites they control. 

This doesn’t just mean the time required to physically change keywords and update content, but also acknowledges the time it takes to stay on top of the constantly changing SEO world. 

Sometimes, you’re busy. Things are more pressing than your search engine optimization routine. 100% legitimate. 

But SEO is still important if you want to keep making sales. 

Don’t Know Where To Start 

Last, but certainly not least common, we have those people who are absolute sharks on the sales floor, legends of the ledger, and top-tier managers but don’t know the first thing about getting to the top position on Google. No shame. 

Sometimes, that’s almost the best place to be. There’s nothing wrong with saying “Dang, this just isn’t what I do. Time to bring in an expert.” In fact, it’s frequently the best call. 

So you find yourself in one of these somewhat precarious positions. What’s a dealer to do? 

How To Solve It: 

SEO success is a two-part situation. 

The 1st step: Set up your site for quality, (and be thorough with your SEO).

There are a lot of places that SEO-boosts hide, like the metadata and alt text of images. Making sure that each and every element of your pages is “searchable” to search engines means that they know all the elements present – and thus that your page is of higher quality. 

Being incredibly thorough on your initial website setup means better results later down the line. And attention to the quality of the customer experience means the search engine bots of the internet will recognize your site’s superiority. 

The 2nd Step: Continual improvement.

Two simple words = a lot of work. Constantly checking up on, tweaking, refreshing, and analyzing your SEO performance comes about to about 90% of the work and results in about 99% of the reward.  

Nobody said it was easy. In fact, if it is, that’s not a good sign. If you’re only spending a couple of minutes every month on optimization, you’re likely not doing enough tending, and your rankings won’t be able to withstand the rapidly changing tides of SEO. 

Conclusion

SEO ain’t nothing to mess with. Or, rather, you should be messing with it all the time. But only if you know what you’re doing. And if you have enough time to keep doing it for a long time. 

So yeah, there are a lot of rules with SEO, and an even greater number of guidelines, guesstimates, and best practices to keep in mind. This isn’t a random piece of the marketing puzzle you can pick up and fiddle with from time to time – it is one of the linchpins of online marketing success.

Is your SEO as effective as you want?