When I mention “off-page” SEO, I’m basically talking about building backlinks to your dealership website.
As I said in my automotive SEO guide, doing off-page SEO is one of the most difficult parts of doing SEO for car dealers.
Building backlinks require a lot more time and effort than other areas of SEO and, in automotive, the success of your off-page strategy is partially out of your control. Not many websites want to link to car dealers’ websites.
I don’t know the exact reason behind not many people wanting to link to car dealerships but I imagine it’s a combination of:
- Car dealership websites don’t have unique content that can’t be found anywhere else
- Most car dealership websites don’t provide a good user experience
- The misconception that all car dealers are shady
However, I’m going to share what I believe to be one of the best (and simple) off-page SEO strategies for car dealerships in America.
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Get Backlinks By Sponsoring Local Events
Most car dealerships already sponsor events local to them. So this idea isn’t new at all.
But, where they go wrong is that they don’t maximize their local sponsorships to help their website. They simply sponsor a local event and call it done.
However, if you’re interested in improving your SEO (past the SEO best practices for car dealers) – I’m going to give you another step.
Even if you only add this one step into your automotive SEO process and stay consistent – depending on how many events you sponsor annually – your website can start to show organic improvement within 12 months.
Request A Link Back To Your Car Dealership Website
When sponsoring local events – ask for a link back to your website.
That’s it.
If you were looking for a secret strategy that no one talks about because it’s too advanced for the average reader – sorry to disappoint you. While advanced off-page SEO strategies exist, I’d never recommend using them unless you’ve tried the simple and straightforward strategies with no success.
In my opinion, It doesn’t make sense to utilize advanced strategies when you have yet to take advantage of the basic strategies.
A More Advanced Tweak
If the tip above was too simple for you or hasn’t worked well – here’s how you can tweak the above tip to help it work better for you.
Instead of just asking the event you sponsor to link to you from their website, you can ask the event to add your logo to their website (preferably a sponsorship section) and have that logo link back to your website.
Although this change isn’t that much more advanced than simply asking for a link back to your website – it’s possible that it will work better than simply asking for a link back to your website.
Overall
It doesn’t matter if you’re actively doing search engine optimization or not, the strategy I shared in this post should be implemented immediately.
It’s relatively simple, doesn’t require any special skills, and doesn’t take much additional time to execute.
I mean, if you’re going to sponsor local events anyway – might as well use it to help your website and ultimately increase your leads and car sales.
