There’s a lot of information on the internet about SEO but a lot of it, while still applicable, is almost impossible to implement for car dealerships. But most people don’t know this because they don’t work in the automotive industry.
I’ve been doing digital marketing for over 10 years and It wasn’t until I started doing digital marketing for new car dealerships that I realized how outdated and difficult it was to properly SEO a car dealer’s website.
Unlike doing SEO in other industries where you have complete control (or a majority) – as a third-party SEO vendor (or person) in automotive, there are several companies you have to work with in order to improve SEO holistically.
For example, here’s a typical arrangement:
| The Company | How They Affect SEO |
|---|---|
| Manufacturer | They push/pull content and force changes on dealers |
| Car Dealer | They manage everyone except the manufacturer |
| Website Provider | They handle everything related to the website including speed, UX, structure, etc… |
| SEO Agency | They do what they can (even though they’re responsible for everything) |
| Additional Vendors | They do whatever they were hired for (sometimes at the expense of SEO) |
As you can see from the table, there are many different people affecting SEO while only one company is actually accountable for the success or failure.
To restate what I said in my automotive SEO guide – SEO is a mess in the automotive industry.
So, in this post, I’m going to share a few simple, but effective, SEO best practices for car dealerships.
Table of Contents
Verify Your Website Is Good For SEO
Your website is the foundation for your SEO.
If the website is poorly built, slow, or structured incorrectly – your SEO is going to suffer no matter what SEO strategies you use. And just because you’re using one of the major manufacturer-recommended website providers like Dealer.com or Dealer Inspire doesn’t mean that your website is good for SEO.
Reccomended Reading: Video Backgrounds Are Hurting SEO On Your Car Dealership Website
In my experience, most manufacturer-recommended website providers good job of giving you a functional website that can help you sell online but do a relatively bad job of optimizing it for SEO.
So, to verify that your website isn’t holding you back – I recommend scanning your website using the following free tools:
If you use both of those tools, you will have a good idea of how good (or bad) your current website is.
Google’s PageSpeed Insights will show you your website’s speed and give you a lot of recommendations and advice for improving your “score” in the eyes of Google (since that’s who you mainly care about as far as SEO is concerned). GTmextrix will show you your website’s speed, as well as additional information about the page you chose to scan that could make optimizing your website easier.
However, if you only want to use one of the tools I linked above, I recommend Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool since it tells you exactly what needs to be fixed/changed in order to improve the website in the eyes of Google.
Purge Old Content And Scripts
Most information around best practices for car dealerships will include creating new content. However, one of the most common problems I see with the website of new car dealerships is the ridiculous amounts of disposable content and pages on the website (you can thank website providers and the manufacturers for that).
I find that in addition to content pages that have very little content on them, content pages that are extremely outdated, and content pages that were “deleted” by removing them from navigation (even though they’re still visible in the sitemap) – there also tends to be unused javascript files on the website (which slow down the website).
Here’s the thing; Google gives every website something called a “crawl budget”. A crawl budget is basically a fancy way for Google to say that they will only crawl/scan a certain number of pages every time they visit your website.
In my experience, the bigger and more authoritative your website – the bigger your crawl budget. But, it’s still a crawl budget. This means Google will likely only crawl a portion of your website every time they visit.
If you have a lot of low-quality content on your website – Google may spend a big portion (possibly the majority) of their time looking at your low-quality content. If Google is spending a big portion of its time looking at low-quality content – it’s likely they’ll assume the entire website is low-quality overall.
To help reduce this possibility (and help Google prioritize your good content) – you should purge/redirect all of your old, low-quality/low-value content that could affect the “crawl budget”.
Recommended Reading: The Best SEO Keywords For Car Dealerships
Simplify Your Website Navigation
Some of the navigations of car dealership websites I look at are wild.
Look, I understand the desire to put certain pieces of content and information in as many places as possible to increase the odds that potential customers see it. I promise I understand.
However, you’re not helping your SEO. In some cases, you’re actually hurting your SEO.
Your website navigation is prime real estate on your website. Only the most important items should go in them. These are some of the first pages to get crawled by Google when they visit your website. And since the navigation is typically on every page of the website – the pages in the navigation tend to get crawled every time Google comes to your website.
For the sake of keeping things simple, you can make a broad assumption that the more a page gets crawled by Google (relative to the other pages on the website) – the more Google will assume it’s a higher priority than the lesser crawled pages on the website.
So, my recommendation is that you audit and simplify your website’s navigation menus regularly. Between website providers, manufacturers, and possibly your internal staff – it’s very easy for your navigation to get out of control.
I mean, I’ve been doing automotive SEO for almost a decade now and occasionally find myself putting to many things in the navigation. Regardless of how great that piece of content is – you have to prioritize what pages you put in the navigation.
Because, if every piece of content you create is special – none of them are.
