Automotive SEO Guide For Car Dealerships

As someone who has done digital marketing (primarily SEO) for over 50 new car dealerships (both luxury and high-volume brands) – I can confidently tell you that SEO in automotive is generally a mess.

If you’re a car dealer that doesn’t have a reputable SEO agency working on your website OR if you’re hiring your website provider or manufacturer-recommended agency for SEO – your SEO is also probably a mess.

And here’s what’s so bad about the automotive SEO industry – most of the educational information online and at dealer conferences are from people who are trying to sell you on an SEO strategy or service that they provide.

They only want to give you information that convinces you to sign up for their feature/service OR they only give you information that makes their company look good (I’ve seen them omit key metrics from reports to help themselves look better than they actually are).

There aren’t many non-biased people providing automotive SEO tips for car dealers.

So, I’m going to create as non-biased a guide as I can for you (the car dealer) to use for both learning about SEO and for holding your SEO person/agency accountable.

Note: at certain parts of this guide it may seem like I’m bashing vendors or website providers but I’m not. We all play a role in the automotive SEO industry and it’s our job to hold each other accountable so that we can make this industry a better place.

At the end of the day, the more money we can help you make (car dealers) the more likely you’ll spread the word about SEO and increase the amount of business available to every SEO person or agency in the automotive industry. It’s a win-win for the entire industry if we continue to work on being better.

So, with that said – let’s get into the guide.

What is SEO?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and it’s basically a digital marketing strategy that helps you show up in Google (and other search engines like Bing) when people search for new or used VDPs/VSRPs, service, specials, parts, and anything else that you (or your dealer group) offers.

Why You Should Utilize SEO As A Car Dealer

As a car dealer, you should utilize SEO because if done correctly – the results (more customers) should stick around for a while (even if you stop doing SEO) and allow you to reduce your paid search spend in areas of your business that you cover organically.

Another benefit is that it allows you to dominate your competitors and bring in customers from outside your PMA – without directly targeting customers outside your PMA.

For example, let’s say you’re a Mercedes-Benz dealer and your website’s SEO is good while your competitor’s website is lacking. If a potential customer is located in your competitor’s PMA and searching for a new GLE – it’s possible that the customer will see your website before your competitors.

And I know this is possible because I still continuously do this for car dealers.

When You Shouldn’t Prioritize SEO As A Car Dealer

You shouldn’t prioritize SEO as a car dealer when you need quick results.

Good SEO is a slow and relatively boring process. And if someone is promising you quick results, that’s an instant sign that you should avoid them.

I mean, don’t get me wrong – car dealers have a lot of “low-hanging fruit” when it comes to SEO. And there have been plenty of times when I have achieved a few quick wins for a car dealer.

But to promise quick results – is reckless.

So, if you need quick results to meet your sales targets or quickly get rid of inventory – don’t prioritize SEO.

Paid advertising (search or social) will be more effective for you.

The Common SEO Problems Auto Dealers Have

Most of the car dealership websites that I work with have a consistent set of problems that make search engine optimization more difficult.

So, in this section, I’m going to share what a few of those problems are

They Have An Extremely Slow Website

Google and other search engines reward fast websites. The slower your website loads, the worse it’s going to perform in the search results. And the worse it performs in the organic search results, the lower your organic website traffic will be.

I was working on a car dealership website recently and their homepage was taking a whopping 25 seconds to load.

This was due to a lot of javascript files (some of which come from vendors that they don’t even use anymore) and a stupid background video that most car buyers don’t even watch.

Reccomended Reading: Video Backgrounds Are Hurting SEO On Your Car Dealership Website

If you’re wondering about the speed of your website, enter the URL of your homepage (or any web page you care about) into both of these tools:

• Google’s PageSpeed Insights
• GTMetrix

In most cases, if your website is handled by one of the major website providers (DDC, Dealer Inspire, DealerOn, etc..) – it’s probably slow.

And, in my experience working with car dealerships (almost a decade) – as long as it looks nice, most website providers don’t care about speed.

Website Analytics Can Be Wildly Inconsistent

Let’s be clear here – Search Engine Optimization is a game of trends, not exact numbers. A very big percentage of all the data surrounding SEO (including the tools we use) is not accurate. However, in most cases, that inaccurate data is consistent – which allows good SEOs to make decisions based on the trends.

But, when it comes to car dealership analytics, not only is it inaccurate a lot of time – it’s also inconsistent. The worse part is that, in my experience, the inconsistencies are usually the result of the website provider or non-SEO vendor – not any one individual or SEO agency.

For example, I’ve noticed a lot of Dealer Inspire websites are having Google Analytics issues where organic traffic is being categorized as direct traffic. This looks to be related to their recent CloudFlare security integration – but who knows?

Last time I heard from them about it they were figuring it out.

Another example involves website providers and vendors pushing events to Google Analytics that alter the bounce rate (thus altering other key metrics as well).

As an SEO, who wants the car dealers I work with to succeed, having inconsistent data can lead me to make incorrect assumptions and create a bad SEO strategy.

Our decision-making as SEOs is only as good as the data we use to make those decisions.

The Existing Content Strategy & Website Structure Is A Mess

There are times when I will go through a car dealership’s website and find hundreds and sometimes thousands of pages that provide no benefit to the dealer.

They’re just there taking up space and “crawl budget” (basically how much of your website Google’s search engine crawlers will scan at one time before leaving and coming back at a later time).

Now, car dealerships aren’t at fault for this. The manufacturer and website provider do a bad job of creating a strategy. A lot of times they throw pages on the website and never take them down/redirect them or anything.

They just live there forever.

And don’t even get me started on how bad the website navigation is on a lot of car dealers’ websites.

Recommended Reading: Car Dealership SEO: Best Practices For Results

The Key Areas Of An Comprehensive SEO Strategy

I’ve talked about some of the problems with automotive SEO, so let’s talk about what you should be focusing on as a car dealer.

Although the details of what goes into an SEO strategy can change depending on your goals, what vehicles are in stock, what specials are available, and more – the areas I list below will give you a general idea of what’s going on behind the scenes.

Technical SEO Strategy

Technical SEO is like the frame of your vehicle. No matter how good the gas mileage is or the luxurious features of the vehicle – if the frame is bad, the vehicle is junk.

Technical SEO works very similarly.

The main goal is to make sure your website is at least meeting the bare minimum of acceptable (by Google’s standards). In other industries, our “bare minimum” is a great website. In automotive, I tend to refer to it as “nothing ridiculously stupid or broken” (sometimes the website speed is ridiculously stupid)

As long as the technical SEO is acceptable – it means that all of the work we do in the future has a fighting chance of improving your website’s ranking and ultimately improving car sales.

On-Page SEO Strategy

If you’ve ever researched SEO strategies before, you’ve probably read about on-page SEO.

This is one of the easiest aspects of SEO. However, due to how bad most car dealership websites are – this can be a very time-consuming task.

The main goal of an on-page SEO strategy is to basically optimize the content on your website. We do this through numerous different methods but here’s the gist of it:

• Title tags (the title of a webpage that you see in Google)
• Meta descriptions (the description of a webpage that you see in Google)
• Image alt tags (an invisible image description that helps visually impaired people understand photos)
• Content heading structure (H1, H2, H3, H4, and H5)
• URLs (keep them as short and optimized as possible)
• Content creation and optimization (changing words and phrases around to help it rank better)
• Internal linking (Shows which pages are more important and helps Google scan the website better)

Usually, when someone says they’re doing on-page SEO, they’re likely talking about a combination of the above methods.

Recommended Reading: On-Page SEO Tips For Car Dealerships

Local SEO Strategy

Local SEO is basically a subsection of SEO that helps your rank well in search engines in your local area.

This is usually done through:

• Optimizing on-page SEO for your local area
• Completing/verifying your Google Business Profile
• Optimizing your Google Business Profile (more reviews, photos, posts, etc..)
• Local citations
• Backlinks

Off-Page SEO Strategy

This is the second most difficult part of doing SEO for car dealers (getting website providers to improve their websites being the first).

Off-page SEO is primarily composed of building backlinks to your website.

In my automotive SEO experience (almost a decade), it’s highly unlikely that your SEO agency (or person) is going to be able to do a good job of building high-quality backlinks to your website (bad backlinks are easy to build and can do more harm than good).

No one wants to link to websites from car dealers. Most websites won’t see any value in linking to a car dealer’s website if they can link to the same article from Autotrader or Cars.com.

Although there are simple off-page SEO strategies that can be used successfully for car dealerships, they will require you (the car dealer) to put in some work as well.

Reporting

Reporting is important because, without it, you have no way of knowing if your SEO agency is scamming you.

I’ve listened to so many reporting phone calls from different vendors and website providers that I can confidently say – if you leave the reporting meeting/phone call feeling unsure if the SEO work your agency is doing for you is working – your SEO agency is likely underperforming or you don’t understand digital marketing enough and should hire a professional to sit on those calls and asses their work.

Some SEO vendors and website provider reps will try to throw as much good-looking (and good-sounding) data as possible in an attempt to look like they’re doing an amazing job.

Well, most of the time I listen to these calls and meetings, it’s a bunch of numbers that either don’t matter or that they’re not responsible for. It doesn’t tell me much about the success or failure of their work.

And look, I get it. Everybody wants to seem like they do excellent work all the time and know everything but SEO doesn’t work that way.

Sometimes we win and sometimes we lose.

Regardless of the outcome of a specific strategy, we learn a lot that allows us to be more decisive and effective the next time. Transparency and honesty are, in my opinion, what automotive SEO desperately needs.

But, until we get there – here are a few simple metrics to pay attention to in any SEO report:

• Organic traffic (Users). Is it up? Is it down? Why? What’s our plan?
• Engagement (engagement time). Is it up? is it down? Why? What’s our plan?
• Leads (calls too). Is it up? Is it down? Why? What’s our plan?
• Specific pages (content that was created by the SEO person/agency). What content worked? What content didn’t work? Why? What’s our plan going forward?

I’m sure you can see a pattern here.

Unless you’ve been working with an SEO agency for a while and trust that they’re honest and doing a good job for you – you have to determine the quality of the work your automotive SEO agency is doing. Especially as a car dealer.

A big portion of reps for vendors and website providers know that most car dealers don’t know SEO and as long as it sounds nice – the meeting will probably be OK.

So, the questioning you do in those meetings that make them explain what they did and how it helped is always important.

Mistakes To Avoid In Automotive SEO

A lot of the information surrounding automotive SEO is dated. And although some of that dated information still works – a lot of the strategic information isn’t optimal for the current state of search engine algorithms.

So, in this section, I’m going to list a few mistakes that you should try to avoid.

Focusing On Keywords

I’ve seen car dealers get upset that they don’t show up for random keywords when they google themselves.

Listen, I get that SEO has been widely marketed as a way to rank for relevant keywords but individual keywords are typically not worth tracking unless a certain keyword has proven to be extremely valuable.

For example, it’s very well possible that the keyword “new cars” and the keyword “new car” could bring in similar traffic that converts differently. If “new cars” converted at 25% and “new car” converted at 1% – then tracking the keyword “new cars” is a smart decision.

But focusing on keywords just for the sake of focusing on keywords is generally not what you should be doing.

Instead, focus on topics and track the performance of those pages.

That will also provide you with keywords that may (or may not) be important in the process.

Recommended Reading: The Best SEO Keywords For Car Dealerships

Not Consulting Your SEO Agency About Website/Content Changes

I understand that you (car dealers) hire SEOs to work for them and don’t have to tell them when they’re changing the website or adding/removing content.

However, that makes our job of helping you gain more customers more difficult.

Earlier in this guide, I said that we (SEOs) can only make good decisions if the data we have is good. That holds true here as well.

If we’re expecting a page to perform a certain way as a piece of a larger strategy and it doesn’t – our next step is to figure out why it didn’t. But, if a lot of changes were made that we weren’t aware of – it becomes very difficult to know if those changes were the problem or if there’s another reason.

Those hours that we spend trying to analyze the data to figure out if we made a mistake somewhere in our process or if your website changes affected our core strategy – could be better spent helping you gain more customers.

I’m not sure yet if this is wishful thinking but I believe all car dealers (and website providers) should consult the SEO agency before making any changes.

I track all changes on some of the car dealership websites I do SEO for and some days the website provider will have pushed new pages, partially removed a few, renamed others, and then linked to broken pages.

It doesn’t matter how good of an SEO you are – you can’t continuously clean up other people’s changes and expect to do great SEO – there are just not enough hours in the day unless you only work on 1 car dealer’s website.

Falling Victim To The Shiny Object Syndrome

Shiny object syndrome is the situation where people focus undue attention on an idea that is new and trendy, yet drop this as soon as something new takes its place. –Wikipedia

It’s becoming more common to hear dealers mentioning buzz words like “AI” and “ChatGPT” when talking about their marketing efforts. And make no mistake, I’m all for car dealers becoming more educated on digital marketing strategies for their business.

However, don’t obsess over every new marketing-related software or automotive seo strategy that pops up.

Just like I said earlier in this guide – SEO is a slow and boring process. While a little excitement once in a while isn’t bad, the most effective SEO for car dealers is still slow and boring.

When it involves automotive SEO, being reliable and consistent is better than being exciting and volatile.

Is SEO Worth It As A Car Dealer?

Yes, SEO is almost always worth it and necessary nowadays. I mean, I honestly can’t think of a situation when SEO is not worth it at all.

If you’re not doing SEO, your competitors will take advantage of that and try to get in front of your potential customers online before you can. Which is not what you want.

So, although the prioritization of SEO may change over time – SEO is 100% worth it.

Frequently Asked Questions