In order to improve your website’s ranking, it is important that your strategy contains three key elements: keyword research, technical SEO, and on-page SEO.
Keyword Research - detailed research to drive traffic
Keyword research isn’t just about finding the most popular words that potential customers look for and including them in content. It is a subtle game that involves looking at a range of data including not only how popular a search term is, but how competitive it is, and how relevant it is to your business.
Our founder is a car enthusiast so understands the target audience and how users search. Having an agency who understands car terms and your market is hugely valuable and means you won't need to spend time educating your agency what different terms mean and able to hit the ground running. Here are some SEO keyword patterns to incorporate into an SEO strategy for an automotive website.
Technical SEO The OBD of site health and performance
Technical SEO doesn’t just optimise your website for search engines, it can help to improve user experience, too. Key activities include:
Page Loading Speed:
A slow-loading website can harm both user experience and SEO rankings. Compress media, use efficient code, and consider using a content delivery network (CDN) to enhance your site's speed.
Secure and Accessible Website:
Ensure your website's URL can be easily reached and crawled by search engines. Using a well-coded website builder and having an SSL certificate to move to HTTPS are steps in the right direction.
Schema Markup:
Schema markup makes it easier for search engines to understand your website. This helps search engines not only to display the most relevant websites in search results, but allows them to provide more information – rich data. Rich data, or rich snippets, are enticing pieces of content that appear under a search result which can help to improve clickthrough rates.
Implementing schema for automotive listings and dealers requires a detailed approach that incorporates specific parts, vehicle makes and locations, such as the examples below:
Examples of schema markup for search engine algorithms:
On Page SEO: fine tuning your content
This is the process of content optimisation to make web pages more visible and improve online traffic. There are multiple factors to be considered, including (in order of importance):
Relevant Keywords
While creating content, it's vital to ensure that it is tailored to the automotive industry with relevant keywords that resonate with your target audience and accurately describe the page. For successful content optimisation, it is necessary to find the balance between highly competitive and long tail keywords:
Highly Competitive Keywords
These are often broad terms with high search volumes. While they can bring a significant amount of traffic, they are usually difficult to rank for due to high competition. However, despite the challenges, it is worth targeting some of these in your content strategy while preserving resources for long tail keywords.
Long Tail Keywords
Long tail keywords are more specific phrases that usually have lower search volumes but can lead to higher conversion rates, such as local SEO terms. They are typically easier to rank for and can target users in the later stages of the buying cycle. Great content optimisation achieves a balance between both types of keywords to maximise your reach and potential ROI.
A skilled SEO company like Bravr has the skills and experience to advise targeted keywords based upon search volume and competition, to help boost traffic to your website.
Content Quality
High-quality, keyword rich, informative, and relevant content is the backbone of on-page SEO. A skilled SEO strategist will prioritise the creation of content that provides value to the reader, answers their queries, and establishes your site as an authoritative automotive business. While quality content can improve your visibility, your site is likely to be penalised for poor practices including keyword stuffing and the use of duplicate content. A successful SEO strategy won't depend on AI content generation as search engines are increasingly getting smarter at detecting AI content vs human (Check out: Is Chat GPT going to steal my job?).
Title Tags
The title tag plays an important role in your SEO endeavours. Meta titles do not appear on a webpage, they appear in search engine results and in the browser tab. Successful title tags are unique for each page, accurately describe the content, and contain target keywords. It's also essential to avoid keyword stuffing, focusing instead on the creation of meta titles that are relevant to the content and appealing to users.
Internal Linking
Connecting different pages of your website through internal links can help distribute link equity throughout the site. Ensure your anchor texts are SEO optimised with target keywords.
Meta Description
Meta descriptions do not impact rankings, but they can influence click-through rates. A well written meta description should summarise the content of the page in 150-160 characters and include relevant keywords. It's safe to include a marketing/sales call to action within a meta description, however search engines may opt not to display it if it's not relevant to the user search or page content.