Search Engine Optimisation, or SEO, is the art of changing content and technical aspects of your website in order to encourage the site to show higher up search result pages on search engines such as Google or Bing. Involving both on-site and off-site aspects, it’s a long-term strategy and something of an artform!
For our car dealer clients, SEO is an important element of a digital marketing strategy, not least because the industry is more crowded and competitive now than it ever has been before. That means that if your competitors have a comprehensive SEO strategy and you don’t, you run the risk of lagging behind and getting less traffic as a result. Add to that the fact that 2017 was a difficult year all round and the importance of covering all digital marketing bases becomes even more obvious.
So, what should you look out for to suggest you need to invest in SEO?
If you’re seeing organic website traffic dropping on Year on Year (we tend not to look to closely at month on month as the industry is so seasonal), then the likelihood is the content and optimisation of your website isn’t correct for the current algorithms (ranking calculations) used by the big search engines.
A downwards pattern like this can be difficult to turn around, so we’d recommend a course of onsite optimisations, content generation and a decent on-site strategy.
Remember: SEO isn’t “quick win” – instead, it’s a long-term strategy that generally sees results in 6-12 months from strategy launch. This is why it fits so well with short-term marketing campaigns to over a fully rounded approach.
An increasingly competitive market is a key trigger to considering an SEO package – especially if they are ahead of you in terms of website functionality! More competition means it is harder to show on the first page of Google, and that means you need to put more effort in to ensure that you don’t get pushed down below your rivals.
Whilst not all that is involved in an SEO strategy, unique content is an incredibly important part of ensuring your website performs well on search engines. If your website is low on content, or you’re aware that a lot of the content is duplicated from manufacturer website, then the chances are you would benefit from an SEO strategy to help make this content unique and develop your site over time.
Does SEO sound like something that would be useful for your dealership? Give us a shout to see how our in-house team can help.