I the great debate of dealership digital marketing, there are several key factors that will either ensure you increase market share, or ensure you lose it. One of the oldest and most obvious is optimizing your dealership website for the search engines. But SEO can be confusing and in some cases tough to prove a return. There are 3 key areas of SEP that your provider must gain and track results in for your investment to be useful.
First and foremost is visibility, and any SEO provider worth their weight should be able to not just build your dealership’s visibility for its most common and useful keywords, it should also be able to keep your competition at bay if they are attempting to muscle in on certain keywords.
Any and all keywords pertaining to your brand, and location, services, and bordering cities and towns should have you as the top spot without a doubt. BUT what about other keywords that your competition ranks well for, but you don’t? In this case, you need to focus on real estate, first page real estate that is. State and county specific keywords are a great place to begin, followed by specific towns your competition markets in. While you will not get #1 for those terms, especially for cities/ towns that your competition is physically located in (thanks to Google algorithm updates over the years), you can, at the least rank on the first page for many of those keywords, taking a spot away from your competition.
Traffic is to many the end all be all of SEO, and while there certainly is truth to it, and the job to be performed is indeed to increase organic traffic, it’s also about the QUALITY of the traffic. Having 10,000 visitors to your website each month is worthless if 70-90% leave without going much deeper than the homepage. The only case where this is not true is when you are sending traffic to a very specific page on your website like the service scheduling page.
But again, more important than volume is quality. What is being tracked by your SEO company in terms of distinguishing quality traffic? This author has stated in the past that your dealership website is, first and foremost, a merchandising website so it pays to investigate how visitors are engaging with your merchandise. Things like VDP views, average time on VDP, average number of VDP views per session. You can also look at SRP metrics to begin diagnosing potential issues with your website. For example, what if you’re seeing a lot of SRP views overall, but few VDP views? Perhaps the pictures you’re using as the vehicle’s primary picture is not optimal.
Third is return on investment. What has SEO done to increase your profit centers? While SEO does not directly affect profit increase (not until the day comes when you can purchase right from the dealer website), it will, when done correctly, increase lead generation and appointment bookings across the profit centers you are focusing on. How has lead generation and appointment setting increased or decreased each quarter? Another bi-product of properly done SEO an also be seeing an increase in things like F&I profits, service upsells, and accessories.
If your current SEO company does a solid job in these three areas then you are in a position of having to think about/ deal with one less thing. But if you feel that these three areas are not being addressed diligently, it may be time to have an SEO audit performed by an outside company.