When most people think about Search Engine Optimization (SEO), the first thing that comes to mind is keywords. In earlier days of digital marketing strategy, adding as many keywords as possible to the content on a website was a somewhat effective way to climb up the organic listings on search engine results. We now call that practice “keyword stuffing,” and search engines have gotten smart enough to recognize and even punish sites that do it.
It is true that SEO is still largely centered on content that contains keywords written in a natural way, in turn providing high-quality content for the reader. That’s why we encourage our dealers to update content pages regularly and maintain a dealership blog for fresh and useful content. However, there is more to SEO than just keywords. Here are a few elements of SEO that operate a bit more behind-the-scenes but are equally important to the health of your website’s search engine ranking:
- Business Citation Management: Think about all the directory-style sites on which contact information for your dealership appears. These could be places like YellowPages.com, FourSquare, CitySearch®, and more. If your dealership’s name, address, phone number, and website are not correct and/or consistent across all these sites it could have a harmful impact on your search engine ranking. Search engines like Google may not find your site to be trustworthy and may be less likely to give your site a high ranking because of it.
- Backlink Scan & Clean-Up: Third-party websites that provide inbound links to your site can be a great resource for increasing your website traffic when those third-party sites are popular, high-value, and provide relevant content. However, if there are low-quality, low-authority, or “spammy” third-party sites linking to your website, those “bad” backlinks can negatively affect the trust and authority of your site for search engine rankings.
- Reputation Management: This is one topic we cover often because as local businesses dealerships must actively monitor their reputation both in the community and online. But online reputation management affects SEO too. Improving your dealership’s overall rankings and reviews on sites like Yelp, Facebook business pages, and even Google itself will show customers that they can trust your business, leading to more clicks and website visits. When search engines recognize that customers trust your business and choose your website when conducting online searches, they are more likely to give your site a higher ranking to help even more customers.
While keywords and content are at the heart of SEO, many other factors play into your website’s performance in search. These more technical and lesser-known aspects of SEO strategy make a big impact, and problems can occur when they are forgotten. These practices are just three examples, among others, that are important to consider when it comes to maintaining SEO best practices for your dealership website.