What is technical SEO in marketing? On the top surface, technical SEO is auditing and optimizing the aspects of your website that improves its crawlability and indexability by search engines. This also provides a superior user experience that gets potential customers to the information they are looking for.
SEO Site Audits
Bake More Pies’ automotive team will perform routine technical SEO audits on your website. These audits generate a full analysis of all of the factors that make your website visible in search engines. Once a site audit is performed, it shows us the errors that are decreasing your website’s site health and overall performance. Once we are made aware of these issues, our team begins implementing any corrections necessary in order to further increase your website’s visibility and ranking. To execute these corrections, we work closely with your automotive website provider.
While technical audits of your dealership website are important, they are also something that should be performed on a monthly basis. As your website grows and there are more hands working on it (from your own team or outside sources) manipulate your website, there are bound to be some errors that occur. If site audits are not performed on a regular basis, many of these errors may go undetected. These errors affect the health of your website, which in turn affects your website’s search ranking. Here are some common errors to be on the lookout for in order to maintain the overall site health of your website:
Broken Links: Ensure that all links on your work appropriately without giving error messages to potential customers who visit your site and click them.
Redirect Chains: Limit the amount of redirects used on your webpage. Having too many can cause your site to slow down. Cleaning these redirects and ensure that users get to their destination as easily as possible.
Duplicate Title Tags/Meta Descriptions: Each page should have unique title tags and meta descriptions that describe the page for users.
Clean XML Sitemap: Make sure your site’s XML sitemap doesn’t have any pages with redirects, have been no-indexed, or contain broken links.
Internal Linking: Provide potential customers on your site with links to additional content and information that are relevant to the page they entered your site from.
Proper Index Directives: Have a robots.txt file in place in order which directs search engine crawlers to the web pages on your site you want to be crawled.
Provide Alt-Image Text: Add in alt text to your images for users using screen readers, or in case the images do not load. This alt text gives further context to these images.
Page optimization is another important factor when it comes to SEO. Page optimization refers to the content and technical aspects of each page on your dealership website. Using the correct metadata and organizing each page using heading tags, helps users and search engines pick up your content and creates a positive user experience. Good site speed and page load times are also factors in improving the user experience on your site.
Google My Business
Another important aspect of boosting your automotive dealership’s SEO ranking is your Google My Business page. Google My Business is one of the top ways any customer finds a business they are looking for. One of the most important Google My Business ranking signals is the number of reviews an automotive dealer has.
The automotive dealership industry is insanely competitive due to the number of other dealers selling comparable brands or even the same brand of cars within your own market. With this high state of competition in mind, the number and quality of reviews left on your Google My Business page is pertinent in determining if your dealership will be located.
In order to present a ranking threat towards your automotive dealership competitors, your dealership needs to have over 1,000 reviews. Having an effective review generation strategy is not optional. Most successful dealerships have between 1,000 and 2,000 reviews on their profile.
Effective Search Optimization
The following items need to be included for an effective campaign:
- Title Tag
- Keywords
- Alt Text
- Meta Descriptions
- Backlinks
- Local Citations
Using the right title tag is important. These are the words that appear on the tip of the page. These words should be unique to each page on your site. Keywords should flow naturally and not be overused. The Alt text displays information about a picture, which can be beneficial for people using screen readers to give them more context. Doing this also improves your results and helps customers know they have found the content they are interested in if the image does not load.
Backlinks help to build out your organic search results. These can be added gradually over time and should always be relevant to your site. Make sure to go through and remove any “deadlinks” that do not work. These deadlinks can drop your search position in Google, so removing these deadlinks is another important factor in ranking high on Google search.
Your homepage should be the page getting the most attention. This does not mean that the other pages should be ignored, as many potential customers may connect to your site from another page rather than the homepage. This is why it’s a great idea to link out the homepage from all of your pages.
