In an age when consumers perform more than 70,000 Google searches every second, companies are competing on an entirely new front—the front page of Google and other similar search engines. For most, that means learning how search engines work, how they determine which results are served first, and how to adjust their websites accordingly. Those activities are all a part of a relatively new field of marketing known as search engine optimization, or SEO, and they’re an increasingly important part of many companies’ online success.
Accord to Forbes Advisor, “Search engine optimization (SEO) refers to optimizing website traffic from search engines to increase traffic organically.” At the heart of SEO is the need to align website content with search engine algorithms—the complicated mathematical formulas that determine which websites are shown to any given search engine user.
As search engines adjust their algorithms, SEO tactics have to evolve and keep pace. While there are dozens of activities worthy of inclusion in a full-featured SEO strategy, a few primary activities tend to have an outsized impact on overall SEO success:
Interestingly, in the midst of this shift toward eCommerce, the automotive industry has stayed surprisingly stuck in the real world. After all, cars can’t be reduced to pixels and their physical parts frequently need service and repair.
But just because your automotive business is made up of brick and mortar, doesn’t mean you can ignore the internet altogether. Sure, your customers may be driving their cars into your garage, but they’re first being driven to your business by an internet search engine.
In order to stay competitive, you’ll need to work on your web presence with search engine optimization in mind. Developing a basic understanding of SEO and engaging in the above activities can help your automotive business improve website performance, attract more leads, and convert more customers.
Keywords: The Key to SEO
Every internet search starts with a set of words, strung together by an ordinary internet user searching for something—a product, a service, an answer to a question. Search engines set out to find websites that align with the words consumers use in their search queries, and more importantly, that deliver on whatever the user is seeking to find.
How to Select Keywords
With an understanding of that basic process, you should begin your SEO efforts by compiling a collection of keywords that consumers use when searching for the automotive services and solutions you offer. Those keywords will become the center of your SEO strategy as you begin incorporating them into your website content.
You should begin your keyword search by consulting your own intuition as an expert in the automotive industry. Ask yourself what consumers are actually entering into search engines when looking for companies like yours. It may be useful to compile a list of your most popular product or service offerings and to ask those who answer customer phone calls which topics come up most frequently.
In order to effectively attract web traffic, you’ll want to test your intuition against concrete keyword research. There are a number of helpful online tools available for generating keyword ideas and for evaluating their fit for your SEO strategy. Keyword Planner from Google is perhaps the most well-known and most powerful keyword research tool. The planner prompts you to enter your initial keyword ideas or your website address before serving you up additional keyword ideas. Most importantly, the tool helps you compare keywords against one another according to several important metrics:
Your website’s analytics can also guide you toward keywords that might be worth including in your SEO strategy. Popular website analytics platforms, including Google Analytics, can tell you which keywords are being used by visitors that currently reach your website through an organic search process.
Adopting a Long Tail Strategy
Because of their potential contribution to a company’s success, competition for keywords can be quite fierce. With so many similar businesses online, you might even begin to wonder how you could ever compete for the keywords you want. One of the best ways to win in a competitive keyword landscape is to employ a “long-tail” keyword strategy. Appropriately named, long-tail keywords attach additional words to common keywords to make them more detailed. The following example demonstrates how an automotive shop might employ a long-tail strategy:
Keyword
Type
Competition
Likelihood of Success
Vehicle Repair Shop
Short Tail
High
Low
Vehicle Repair Shop in Akron Ohio
Long Tail
Medium
Ford Repair Shop in Akron Ohio
The actual keywords that you select will be entirely dependent upon your business and its unique attributes. Be sure to build a set of keywords that aligns with your company, its offerings, and its audience, while avoiding words with high competition.
Putting Your Keywords into Action
Identifying the right keywords is only the first step in your search engine optimization process. The next step is to incorporate those keywords into your website copy and content, where they can be found by search engines and the people that make up your company’s core audience. Most SEO practitioners agree that “content is the fuel that draws users to your brand.”
There are a variety of ways that relevant, keyword-rich content can be added to your website, including: standard webpages, blog articles, and beta descriptions and back-end data.
Keyword-Rich Webpage Content
Even before factoring for any SEO considerations, your website should be filled with relevant, content that your users find helpful and interesting. Your homepage and your product or service pages will probably not need to be rewritten entirely, but will benefit by adding your research-based keywords.
Keyword-Rich Blog Posts
One of the easiest ways to regularly refresh your website with relevant, engaging keyword-rich content is by hosting a blog. Due to their editorial nature, blogs allow you to post a variety of topic-based articles, targeting specific subjects that interest your audience and that naturally require the use of your keywords.
Keyword-Enhanced Meta Descriptions
You should also consider including important, relevant keywords in each web page’s meta description. While most experts agree that Google and other search engines no longer use meta descriptions when determining search ranking, they can still elevate your search performance by improving click-through-rates in the following ways:
Search engines succeed by delivering results that are relevant to users and related to consumer queries. The best way to do that is to reward powerful content and positive consumer experiences. However, the relationship between keywords and web copy can easily be exploited in ways that do not reward the user with higher quality, more relevant content.
To prevent people from gaming the system, search engines penalize websites that mindlessly pack keywords into poorly written paragraphs. That practice—commonly called keyword stuffing—is now easily discoverable and can actually result in poor SEO performance. According to HubSpot, a leader in online content, “there are no hard and fast rules for keyword density, [but] many SEO [experts] recommend using approximately 1-2 keyword for every 100 words of copy. That factors in to about 1-2% keyword density.”
In order to capitalize on your keyword strategy, focus on providing website visitors with engaging, readable content. Only use keywords when they are relevant and can be worked in naturally. Search engines see high-quality websites and reward well-written, authentic content.
In their quest to connect web users with high-quality experiences, search engines consider more than just the content of websites. They also rely on online ratings and reviews left by consumers on search engine directories. Because those ratings and reviews reflect the opinions of actual business patrons, they can serve as strong signals of a business’ overall quality and credibility.
Reviews can help your local SEO efforts in two primary ways. First, they can improve conversion, or the likelihood that a user will click on your business instead of another shown in the search results. Second, they can also have a direct impact on search ranking as they now factor into search engine algorithms. Several factors can maximize the SEO benefit of reviews:
The benefits of positive rankings go beyond improvements in search results position. High performing businesses, as measured by Google’s star ratings, get an additional boost when they are included in the so-called “map pack.” Map pack results appear at the top of the page and are also shown within an on-page map.
There is strong evidence to suggest that star ratings strongly factor into Google’s decision to include certain businesses in the map pack. Further evidence suggests that listings included in the map pack convert at a high rate, resulting in additional traffic. According to one study, the map pack “appears in search results over 30% of the time and those links receive upwards of 70% of organic search traffic.”
While it’s tempting to think that online ratings and reviews are entirely in the hands of consumers, your business can do a lot to encourage favorable online reviews:
Mitigating the Impact of Negative Reviews
It’s no secret that online reviews aren’t entirely within your control and that not all ratings and reviews will be positive. Fortunately, as outlined by SEO Journal, “Even negative reviews can have a positive effect if they are resolved promptly and in a positive way. Perhaps the worst thing a business can do is not respond to a review to show the customer you are listening.”
Even negative reviews that are never resolved and revised can bring some benefit to your business in the following ways:
Businesses that develop successful systems for soliciting positive reviews enjoy the benefits of content they don’t have to create themselves—content that can boost their overall search rankings and conversions.
Reviews aren’t the only form of social capital that search engines factor into their rankings. In fact, search engines use inbound links—traditionally called “back links” in the field of SEO—to measure the “shareability” and popularity of a website’s content. After all, one of the most effective ways to ensure that search engines are connecting people with quality content is to measure the number of other websites that are linking to that content.
Ideally, many of the links bringing traffic to your website will be the natural result of publishing great content. As you produce content that people want to consume, those same people will naturally want to share it with their own online communities. Those shares will bring in more content organically, but they will also be seen, tracked, and accounted for by search engines.
Of course, many marketers have found that they can accelerate the distribution of their content by actively soliciting shares through a process known as link building. Link building involves reaching out to the owners of other websites and asking them to share your content with their audiences via a direct hyperlink to your site.
When link building, it’s important to remember that credibility transfers. A link coming from a powerful, popular website is worth more than a link coming from a relatively unknown online source. On Google, that power and popularity are measured according to a metric known as PageRank. In earlier days of SEO, PageRank was an easily identifiable, public-facing metric. While that’s no longer the case, PageRank is still being used by Google algorithms to determine how much authority a website has and how much of a boost its links should provide to the destination site.
The need for links has created an entire industry of link building, with armies of content experts actively drumming up connections between websites. But you can start cultivating more inbound links all on your own. We suggest the following activities:
Online business directories are another easy way to build an external link back to your site. By claiming and enhancing listings on various directory sites, you communicate to search engines that your site is worthy of the visitors you’re trying to attract.
The Value of Internal Linking
PageRank is passed from website to website—it can also be passed between two pages within the same website. That’s good news for your business because it creates an opportunity for improving search performance with minimal time and effort. Internal linking is perhaps the most underrated of all common SEO activities and is often overshadowed by external link-building activities. By linking from one page of your website to another, you are signaling to search engines that the content on the destination page is worth viewing and is deserving of additional rank.
By incorporating links into your SEO strategy, you send a strong signal to search engines that your website is credible and that its content is useful to others. Start by linking between pages on your own site, then expand your efforts by seeking others with established online authority to share your content.
As an automotive company, your brick-and-mortar shop is at the center of your business. It’s where key customer conversations occur and where work gets done—and that’s not likely to change in the near future. Nevertheless, in today’s digital world, you’ll need to drive customers to your website before they’ll drive into your shop or up to your store. Your business can employ several simple tactics as part of an overall SEO strategy to improve its search rankings, attract more customers, and boost your business.
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