Some things never change, but SEO is not one of those things. Even a 2-year-old website isn’t going to continue to cut it on the SEO front today, and that’s in any industry. Think about your business. Has anything changed more in the last 2 years than automotive? Your dealership may be falling behind in SEO. Now is the time to examine your SEO practices and see how your website can and should evolve to align with the current state of SEO in automotive.
Content is Still King
The importance of good content is not going away. Long gone are the days of keyword stuffing and hoping for the best. Google wants engaging, unique, and informative content. This means each page should have expert care with content written by someone experienced with SEO. It takes a real wordsmith to identify the right keywords and incorporate them expertly into well-written content.
A new thing in SEO is the idea of Passage Ranking. It came to Google in early 2021, and it’s here to stay. With Passage Ranking, parts of a page can rank independently of the page itself. If you have a page for the new Kia EV6 and a section of the page is optimized for charging, you could rank for just that section with “Kia EV6 charging” search terms. This means you need experienced writers who write with that concept in mind. Luckily, at Phantom Copy, we know a few ghostly writers with that level of expertise.
An ongoing development in SEO is the rise in voice search. More and more, people are just talking into their phones or smart devices to get the information that they need. Over 40% of those answers are provided directly from featured snippets. This means, on top of everything else, your content and even your keywords are going to rank better with a more conversational tone. Doing so can land you a coveted featured snippet of your own.
The Artist Formerly Known as Google My Business
One of the big changes from the beginning of 2021 to now is actually a simple name change. Google My Business is now called Google Business Profile (GBP). It still boasts of the same great features, and it is still extremely important to your ongoing success on the Internet.
If you’re a car dealership and you only did one thing for SEO, it should be to set up your Google Business Profile. Setting it up isn’t difficult, but there are a few steps to the process, and you will have to confirm your address with a code sent via good-old-fashioned snail mail.
You can take your GBP one step further and provide continuous updates with optimization of products, services, business categories, responding to reviews, and routine posting. For many, especially on mobile, this little page on Google will be the first thing they look at to learn about your business.
Nothing Beats a Good Audit
Audits don’t sound fun, and quite frankly, they are not, but they should be done regularly on your site. Even if you are not adding new content, things change, practices shift, and people are always going to be messing around in your site’s backend one way or another. Over time, things just end up wrong, and routine audits will steer your site back in the right direction.
Getting a site audit done once a month will ensure that all the nitty-gritty SEO items are handled. Seemingly small issues can turn into huge drops in traffic, and those drops don’t get fixed overnight. More so than ever, your website is the face of your business, and making sure that everything from your sitemap to your meta descriptions is in order ensures that your site doesn’t get relegated to the Google graveyard.
The Market is Changing, Should Your Site Change Too?
It’s 2022 and your new inventory probably still has more holes than Swiss cheese. You’ve spent good money trying to get people to find your latest new models, but now you may not need help selling them. What does need help? Your used inventory and your services.
Good SEO and good content can direct people in your local area to you when they need an oil change, tires, or a used car. These are all things that many dealership websites did not have in mind when they were initially designed and optimized. What’s more, there may be something else you want to start optimizing.
Is your used inventory looking slim? Are you having trouble finding the used cars that your customers are looking for? Have you considered doing SEO specifically to entice people who are looking to sell their car? There are numerous car-buying sites out there these days, but you could create your own and have an advantage.
You are local. This means an experienced SEO expert will have an easier time optimizing for local search terms and you have the local connection to offer anyone looking to offload their car. If your used inventory needs an infusion of quality options, then perhaps you need some SEO to provide that much-needed boost. You could even consider a dedicated car-buying site. At Phantom Copy, we may know some ghosts that can provide such a thing.
Be Local–It’s Where Your Car Buyers Are
A car dealership is inherently local. You live and die by the local foot traffic (and digital traffic) you can get. A good dealership with healthy content will actually receive a good amount of national traffic though. This is a good thing as more traffic from anywhere will help increase your domain authority and even push you up the Google rankings especially for those all-so-important local searches.
However, to truly dominate your local area you are going to need a strong mix of local content and SEO targeting the keywords that are important to you. Leverage your location with optimized local content, SEO, and marketing to back it all up.
AMP Has Been Ghosted
Okay, AMP–also known as Accelerated Mobile Pages–may not be dead, but it is certainly dying. You may have been sold by AMP in the past, and it was very important at one point. Let’s take a quick history lesson on the state of SEO for mobile devices.
There once was a time when the best practice was to have two different sites, one for desktop and one for mobile. Then Google flipped the script and wanted unified experiences for customers with fast load times all around.
History tends to repeat itself because a few years later, AMP comes around. It’s still mostly the same experience, but with some features and functionality stripped out for faster loads on mobile. Google liked the idea but has since dropped it from its list of ranking factors. Right now, it may not hurt your rankings to have use AMP practices, but it won’t help either and it’s better to instead provide the same experience across devices. AMP is just no longer a selling point.
Bring Your Content and SEO Back from the Grave
Phantom Copy can do a lot of things. We have experienced writers, we offer both recurring and one-time content, we even have a marketplace where you can buy content that’s already written and ready to be implemented. We can also provide routine SEO audits, Google Business Profile setup and optimization, PPC, and so much more all done by a team of SEO experts. Do you need a new car-buying site? Our ghosts can build it!