Automotive SEO: 11 Tips for Car Dealerships to Maximize Traffic and Sales

Are your competitors overshadowing your car dealership business and stealing away people who will otherwise be your customers?

Fret not. Your business can make a glorious comeback with automotive SEO for car dealerships.

In this article, I’ll tell you why automotive SEO is the one-stop solution you need and the best tips to implement it properly for your business to bounce back with a boasting online presence. 

How Automotive SEO Solves Challenges for Car Dealerships

Here are the specific reasons why car dealerships should invest in SEO.

High Competition

The automotive sector is intensively competitive, with 18000+ dealerships and car aggregator platforms in the US alone. Competing with these players using only traditional marketing techniques can be difficult.

SEO helps your car dealership brand showcase a strong online presence to attract more leads and thereby generate more inquiries.

Image-Heavy Websites

Car dealership websites are often packed with images and videos. This can slow down page speed and drive visitors away.

Optimizing them and improving site performance using SEO best practices can increase page loading speed and enhance user experience.

Fragile Local Presence

Most car buyers search online for dealerships near them. If you don’t appear for local searches, you lose customers.

By focusing on local SEO, you can dominate local search results and appear in Google’s Local-3-Pack or on Google Maps. This will bring more foot traffic to your physical store. 

Decline in Physical Test Drives

Today’s car buyers prefer watching videos over taking test drives.

Creating and optimizing test drive videos for different car models ensures that you meet your audience’s preferences while gaining visibility in video search results on Google and other search engines.

11 Automotive SEO Tips for Car Dealers

Check out the best automotive SEO tips for car dealerships below.

1. Focus on Keyword Research

Suppose a customer is searching for “Best SUVs for Sale” on Google. If your content is not optimized for that keyword, your website won’t appear in search results.

First off, you need to identify keywords car buyers are using to find dealerships like yours online. That’s why keyword research is important.

Ranking higher in search for relevant keywords will bring more visitors to your car dealership website. This way, you will see a spike in conversions and, ultimately, car sales.

Use tools like Ahrefs or Semrush to identify keywords with a good search volume.

Heads up. The higher the keyword difficulty, the more effort you need to put in to rank for the particular keyword.

Pro Tip: To start with, target long-tail keywords with a low keyword difficulty yet a moderate search volume to attract qualified leads.

For example, a long-tail keyword like “certified pre-owned cars” is a good choice.

2. Create Content Helpful for Car Buyers

Your website should be more than just a catalog of cars. It should be a resource addressing the pain points of potential buyers and educating them on automotive-related topics.

For example, you can create blogs, guides, videos or FAQs on titles like “Signs you need a new car” or “How to find a budget-friendly car”.

Besides attracting visitors to your website, leveraging your content to address the needs of your audience will help boost your E-E-A-T and position yourself as a trusted source of information in the car dealership industry. 

This can boost your brand image incredibly.

On top of all that, Google is fond of websites boasting E-E-A-T. As a result, the search engine will offer you higher rankings, giving your website a visibility boost online.

Make sure you optimize your content with relevant keywords sprinkled naturally.

3. Optimize Your Product Pages

Car dealership sites are most likely to have several product pages featuring different cars.

If a visitor lands on one of your product pages, clearly, they are considering buying that product.

Cars are high-value products. That said, it is pretty natural for your potential buyers to have specific questions about the product.

Craft every product page content in such a way that it answers potential questions customers have in mind about the specific product.

This can include a detailed product description, product specifications, warranty period, test drive video, customer reviews and testimonials and more. 

Plus, optimize product pages with relevant keywords to boost their SERP appearance for relevant searches.

For example, Edmunds, a car aggregator website, is ranking at the top for several product searches.

In fact, the list of their top-performing content is dominated by product pages. 

4. Build Internal Links

Only pages indexed by the search engine appear in search results. Internal links make it easier for Google to discover and index new pages on your car dealership site. 

Build a strong internal linking structure to help Google index your content faster.

Plus, internal links help your visitors easily navigate to relevant pages on your website and explore more information about cars.

This way, a well-structured internal linking strategy keeps visitors longer on your site and helps increase conversions.

5. Invest in Video SEO

Creating and optimizing video content is an integral part of SEO for car dealerships. I’ll tell you why.

When I searched for “how to find the best SUV with good fuel efficiency” on Google, I found video results right beneath Google’s AI overviews.

That means to rank higher for a query like this one, you need to create video content.

Yes. Content types matter. You can’t create a blog or infographic for a user query prioritizing video results.

Videos are a must-have for car dealerships. They come in handy to demonstrate test drives, safety features and the luxury interiors of the car. This can help your potential buyers visualize owning the car and drive purchase decisions.

Optimize your video titles and descriptions with relevant keywords to improve visibility in search results.

Embed videos on your product pages and share them across platforms like YouTube and other social media for a wider reach.

Also, remember your car dealership website is image-intensive. So, in addition to doing video SEO, make sure you implement image SEO best practices to optimize your images properly. 

6. Optimize Your Google Business Profile

As I mentioned earlier, local presence is essential for car dealerships.

Creating and optimizing the Google Business Profile (GBP) allows you to appear in local search results, including Google Maps and Local-3-Pack.

Ensure your NAP (Name, Address, Phone number) is accurate and consistent across your website, GBP and other platforms across the web.

Update GBP information, such as photos and posts, to keep your profile fresh and updated consistently.

Additionally, highlight unique offerings like free test drives, festive discounts and more, on your GBP to boost click-through rates.

7. Build High-Quality Backlinks

Backlinks are endorsements from other websites to your own. They tell search engines that your site is reliable and trustworthy. 

Again, take Edmunds, for example.

They’ve consistently built backlinks. From having backlinks from 32,500 referring domains, they now have 42,700 websites pointing to them. That’s over 10,000 more websites endorsing them in less than a year. 

This is as well one of the reasons the website is ranking on Google’s first page for automotive searches.

You can make similar results a reality for your car dealership website too. 

Focus on building high-quality, relevant backlinks from other authoritative websites, including car dealerships, car aggregator sites and review sites.

Create high-quality content that’s helpful for the audience of the external site hosting your backlink.

This can drive qualified referral traffic to your website from authoritative sources, boosting your rankings and ROI alike.

If you need help building great backlinks that drive results, feel free to leverage our powerful link building services. We are a team of 200+ link building experts trusted by 2500+ global brands. Our scalable link building solutions are a perfect fit for businesses of all sizes.

8. Keep Your Website Mobile-Friendly

With a majority of car buyers browsing on their phones to find the right cars, having a mobile-friendly website is mandatory.

Plus, with mobile-first indexing implemented, Google’s algorithms prioritize ranking mobile-friendly websites higher in search results.

Make sure your website loads quickly to offer a seamless user experience on smaller screens.

Use a responsive web design to ensure your inventory looks just as appealing on a smartphone as it does on desktop screens.

Check your website’s mobile friendliness using Google’s free Pagespeed Insights tool.

9. Implement Schema Markup

Implementing schema markup properly can transform how your website appears in search results. 

Rich snippets featuring review stars, car specs, and pricing can grab attention and increase click-through rates.

Leverage appropriate structured data types, such as Auto, LocalBusiness, and Product,  to highlight key details and secure a spot in enhanced search results.

10. Keep Your Website Technically Healthy

Lurking technical issues can drive potential buyers away from your car dealership site. Plus, they produce a negative SEO effect and affect your rankings.

Run technical SEO audits periodically to identify and address issues, including, 404 error codes, duplicate content, broken links and slow page loading, within your website.

11. Measure SEO Performance

Monitoring the performance of your automotive SEO campaigns is essential to measure SEO success.

For one last time, let me show you an example from Edmunds.

Look at their organic traffic value graph steadily gliding up. That means their SEO strategy is working. Their site now boasts a monthly organic traffic value of over 12 million USD.

Implementing the right automotive SEO strategy can help you see positive results like that.

Use tools like Google Analytics, Search Console, Ahrefs and Semrush to keep track of your Automotive SEO performance.

Keep an eye on metrics like Domain Authority, keyword rankings, backlinks, clicks and impressions to measure your website’s performance and tweak your strategy accordingly.Looking forward to building your personalized automotive SEO strategy? Book your free link building consultation with Stan Ventures to get the SEO strategy tailored to your needs.