Most search engine optimization products and offerings work the same. They will take any customer, perform typical SEO tasks that they do for other websites, and at the end of the day, they’re scratching their heads wondering why they can’t seem to breach the top rankings. Automotive SEO is an entirely different beast than any other type of optimization.
There are things that make automotive SEO a specialized discipline.
Any SEO can tell you that content is king. It’s a catch-phrase in the industry because in reality, it works. Google and the other search engines love content – lots of it, and it must be unique.
The challenge for automotive websites is that most of the top automotive design firms use different variations of the same content for all of their dealers. One website might say this:
“John Smith Ford in is one of the top Ford Dealers in the country. Their selection of new and used F150s, Fusions, Explorers, and Escapes is unmatched by anyone in .”
A different website by the same provider would say this:
“Bob Jones Honda in is on of the top Honda Dealers in the country. Their selection of new and used Ridgelines, Accords, Pilots, and CRVs is unmatched by anyone in .”
Most automotive website providers and general SEO services do not know how to handle this issue.
A website that doesn’t change doesn’t inspire the search engines to give it high rankings. This is becoming more prevalent every passing month. Car dealers rarely if ever change the content on their homepage.
There are ways to keep a website’s content fluid and exciting to the search engines without the dealer having to make changes or add new content all of the time. Very few SEOs and even fewer automobile website providers know how this is accomplished.
For most search engines, a link from a website to another counts as a vote. The more high-quality, relevant links a website has pointing at it, the better it will rank.
Any search engine optimization company and a couple of the auto website providers can tell you this, but it is still much of a mystery how to get websites to link to car dealers. They aren’t the kind of business with which other websites want to associate.
For automotive, many companies are relying on reciprocal linking (link exchanging) to power their link popularity campaign. As the days pass, so passes the weight that Google gives to these kinds of links.
Link baiting, the process of creating something on a website that will compel webmasters to want to link to it, is very difficult for automotive websites. What can a dealership offer in the way of articles or gadgets that would have this effect? Very few can answer that.
There is a distinct increase in the power of social media seo and viral marketing. It is given more weight that other forms of link building because it is controlled by many people. An SEO company can “Digg” a car dealer website over and over and never be able to get it to the front page. Nobody cares about a car dealer, so they have no reason to “Digg” it.
There are SEO services that offer social bookmarking and other forms of link building through social media, but few, if any, can take an automotive website and get it to the top of Digg or other websites. Getting to the front page is a traffic and SEO goldmine, but general SEOs can never crack that top page position.
If there is more than 1 or 2 auto dealer website providers who even use social bookmarking, it would be amazing. Most wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between del.icio.us, simpy.com, and reddit.com, even if they had ever heard of them.
Conclusions
Automotive SEO is extremely challenging. It requires more knowledge of the intricacies of both the car industry and the SEO market than just about any branch of optimization. The competition for search terms such as car buying tips is over 14,000,000 websites, many of whom are extremely well optimized.
Before choosing an SEO company or website provider to do search engine optimization for an automotive web site, a smart general manager and internet sales manager will check the rankings of the prospect’s automotive clients.
The proof is in the results.
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