4 Ways to Keep Your Dealership From Being Buried Alive

“The best place to hide a dead body is on the second page of Google.”

Though the exact source of this joke is unknown, it has been floating around the marketing world for years. All humor has some truth to it. When was the last time that you clicked on the “next” button at the bottom of the search result page?

We have become accustomed to having information readily available without having to do any work. Chances are slim that consumers would find search results that are buried six feet under competition.

So why do some businesses flourish while others, despite their best efforts, sink further down into the second page or beyond? Sometimes simply making efforts of SEO aren’t enough, and some efforts are often misleading and hurt results.

Here are the four SEO mistakes that are digging your dealership's search results deeper into their grave:

1. Key Word Stuffing

Keywords are one of the most basic components in improving a website’s content and boosting organic search results. But just like any other skill, keyword usage requires time to master. Many novice marketers make the mistake of thinking the more keywords the better.  They decide to jam as many keywords into a page as possible in hopes to increase their rankings and to bring more people to their page. This practice is known as Keyword Stuffing, and it doesn’t work.

The first problem is that it negatively affects users experience, since the pages are crowded with too much and often irrelevant wording, therefore lowering a website's ranking. The second problem is that keyword stuffing is easily detected by the algorithms of search engine crawlers. If your site contains an abnormal density of single keywords, your site will actually drop in the rankings.

2. Giving into Other Black Hat Temptations

Black hat SEO is practicing anything that goes against search engine guidelines in order to raise a site’s ranking. Keyword Stuffing does fall into this category, but there is a long list of other black hat tactics.

These approaches include creating link farms that cram unnatural numbers of links into a site to increase the number of back-links, paying other websites to link to your page, redirecting viewers to different URLs than the ones they initially clicked on, and cloaking your website from search engine crawlers.  It is inevitable that search engine bots will discover these tactics and, in return, lower your site’s ranking. The quick and easy is always tempting, but it will never be substantial in the world of SEO.

3. Not Optimizing Local Search

50 percent of searches made on mobile devices result in an in-store visit that day. This means that local search results are crucial to a business’s website, especially in the automotive world. It doesn’t matter if someone who lives thousands of miles away can find your site when people within your area can’t find you by searching “dealerships near me”. Failing to reflect local intent can be in the form of not including localized keywords, not including city names and zip codes and not utilizing online directories like Google My Business.

4. Poor Social Media Presence

Search engines not only analyze what is on your company’s website content, but they also analyze the way people interact with your company on social channels. If there is no one responding to customer reviews and inquiries, engaging with customers, or promoting your business search engines will notice. Having a social media strategy is vital to your SEO success.

Conclusion

The moral of this terrifying tale is that there is no quick fix solution to improving organic search engine results. The only way to dig a business out of its digital grave is investing the time and resources needed to develop strategic marketing strategies, high-quality content, and customer engagement.