As a car dealership, you need to rely on local automotive SEO to be visible online where your customers are starting their car buying process.

You don’t want to be that dealership that doesn’t care about its online appearance, but you aren’t sure how to make your website pages appear at or near the top of search engine results pages. Let’s go over some tips that can help you.

Provide Useful Content

While your pages will be written with a particular keyword in mind, you want that content to be useful to your customers. What qualifies as useful content? Give your readers information about vehicles in your inventory, local events, news from the area, services you offer, and current promotions. These are the things your audience is looking for when they search for many of the keywords associated with car dealers.

Implement Schema Mark-Up on Your Pages

Not many websites are making use of Schema mark-up, but this additional code is made to help search engines better understand your content. Anything that can improve your local automotive SEO can make it much easier for your website to show up at or near the first page of search engine results pages. This strategy adds ease and authority to your website that allows you to be where you want when customers search for your vehicles.

Local Matters, Get Connected to Local Organizations

When you’re working to improve your local results, you want to have local organizations linked to your website. How can you obtain local links and community visibility? Ensure your dealership is listed as a sponsor on websites for charities you donate to as well as on pages for organizations you’ve allowed to use your dealership to host events. This is a great partnership that can influence your online ranking.

Bring in More Positive Revies to Improve Your Local Automotive SEO Results

The elation and joy you see on the face of a customer that just purchased a new or used vehicle from your dealership need to be turned into positive reviews for your dealership. These reviews need to be posted to your website and should be part of the ranking you earn on Google and other search engines.

Stop Using Home Page Sliders

While sliders on your home page seem to give your viewers a snippet of the sales and deals you offer at your location, there is proof that very few users ever look at or click on the second slide offered. The click-through rate of the first slide is terrible, to begin with, and by the time you have the third slide, users have stopped looking at this part of your page.

Create the Right Website Style for Your Business

Your website is your first impression and when you’re trying to improve your local automotive SEO, you’re going to want to have the best first impression you can. Include all the pertinent information on the home page and make sure the text on the home page is SEO-friendly to give you the ranking you desire. Ask for opinions from others to see if your site is attractive and engaging to them.

Claim Your Google My Business Page

One of the first things you should do to ensure you improve your local visibility online is to claim your Google My Business page. This page contains the information a user needs to connect with your business and learn more about you. Your hours, phone number, address, and other details are listed on this page to let your online visitors get to know you a little better.

Gain Credibility in Your Local Community with Citations

When other companies and organizations mention your company name or address on their pages, you want to link to those pages and enjoy the added authority of these citations. Using an aggregator tool can help you cultivate these citations and get more of them across the various online tools that are offered. These citations can improve your local brand recognition.

Review Your Analytics to Improve Your Local Automotive SEO Results

What are the most popular pages on your website? Do you have blog pages that have been read more than any other? Are there some pages that need work to improve the ranking around the keywords used? Your analytics tools can help you with this and bring you the visibility to see where you need to improve. As a car dealership, your local automotive SEO is critical to your success and the analytics of your website is crucial to improving your overall ranking online.