Bharat SainiLast Updated on November 22, 2014 by Bharat Saini
Investing in Search Engine Optimization doesn’t mean taking the time to throw key words and phrases such as “car” or “dealership” or even “car dealership” on every page of your website. Investing in Car Dealer SEO means finding the person or company with the right training, skills and ability to analyze not just your industry but where you stand against your competitors, and then knowing how to optimize your website accordingly.
Here are reasons you should not allow another year to pass without investing in car dealer SEO:
1. Bad SEO is as Detrimental as No SEO, Sometimes Worse. Most dealerships have attempted to add car dealer SEO on their own, typically assigning an employees to add self-identified keywords into their website. While this may sound like a cost-effective way of keeping up with your competitors on the SEO forefront, adding key words and phrases without the right car dealer SEO training can lead to the use of bad techniques such as ‘stuffing.’ Stuffing (loading a webpage or the meta tags with keywords) will gain the attention of search engines all right, but not in the way you want. Stuffing and other SEO shortcuts are considered unethical search engine optimization and will hurt your website ranking. The search engines penalize your website for unethical ‘tactics’, sending your website lower into the rankings, or they may ban your site altogether. That’s worse than maintaining a site without using any car dealer SEO. The dealerships that rise to the top spots in the rankings are the ones that invest in proper car dealer SEO.
2. Proper SEO will Position Your Dealership in the Right market. Focusing on the right key words and phrases will position your dealership in the right market. For example, you wouldn’t want to focus on the term “Vehicles” when the majority of your target audience searches for “Cars”. A car dealer SEO expert will identify the words/phrases needed for your site and target market. The right SEO words will allow your customers to find you, often making the difference between a sale and no sale.
3. Your Competitors have Hired Car Deal SEO Experts. Your larger competitors have likely already invested in car dealer SEO, determined to draw customers away from you and other dealerships. If you want to keep your customers, and ideally gain new customers, then you will need to, at the very least, stay on par with your competition. That means using an SEO expert to essentially fight fire with fire.
4. Best ROI among all the Online Advertising Options. As compared to PC advertising, social media marketing and hiring an outside firm to drum up leads for an email marketing campaign that has the potential to alienate more customers than it brings in, SEO is an easy, clean, subtle but effective way to attract customers. This isn’t to say Social Media isn’t a worthwhile component of marketing, but it isn’t the foundation for your online presence – your website is. That means optimizing your website for the search engines is how you will get the biggest bang for your buck online.
5. Building History – SEO isn’t going away and what you do now will affect your SEO ranking in the future. Search engines look at a site’s age and SEO history. Getting started now, with the right car dealer SEO strategies, will help your website ranking down the road.
6. Search Engines Keep Changing the Rules – The big search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing) each have their own formula for how they rank websites, and they are constantly changing those formulas. According to Performance Media Placement, Google alone has over 200 criteria it uses, and according to Search Engine Watch, Google changes its algorithm 500 to 600 times per year. The SEO experts know which strategies work, which ones don’t, and how to adjust for change. It’s a full time job assessing which words and phrases to integrate into a dealership website, as well as shifting strategy to keep up with changes made by the search engines.
If you are wondering what it costs to invest in SEO, you need to ask yourself what it costs you NOT to invest in proper car dealer SEO. With the right firm handling your car dealer SEO, you will see a return on investment that not only makes you a fan of SEO, but will also make you wonder why you ever waited so long to invest in SEO.
About Author:
Syed Azam is the founders of AutoJini in Ames, Iowa. For the past 10 years AutoJini has been providing auto dealership website solutions to dealers & franchise.
