How to Improve Your Automotive SEO: 3 Simple Steps, Based on Experience

There are many ways that you can improve your automotive SEO.

However, you must be willing to put in the work and find where your current automotive SEO is letting you down. You don’t just rebuild a broken engine with a random part, you identify what needs replacing in order to get that engine performing.

If you don’t have the team, knowledge, or the tools to find where you need to improve, it can be easy to give up improving your marketing strategy.

Thankfully, you’ve come here – welcome. This plan outlined here will:

• Improve your automotive SEO (search engine optimisation).
• Increase traffic to your website.
• Turbocharge the number high-quality backlinks to your website.

Here is a simple 3-step plan to improve your automotive SEO efforts.

1. Find where your current Automotive SEO strategy can be improved

One of the most important aspects of improving your SEO efforts is to locate exactly where and how they can be improved.

When you do that, you’ll know exactly where you need to improve instead of playing a guessing game.

Another benefit of finding where your current search engine optimisation strategy can be improved is that it allows you to focus on aspects that will help. This reduces the unnecessary tactics you may be undertaking. [1]

When finding where your SEO strategy can be improved, I recommend doing the following:

Website Audit

Any SEO campaign should include website audits. Whether it’s at the beginning of an SEO project or a constant go-to. We audit our client’s websites at least 4 times every week just to keep on top of things.

When it comes to auditing your website, there are a wide array of tools you can use.

Website audit tools

• Screaming Frog
• Google Search Console
• Search Engine Tuning

Screaming Frog

Screaming Frog is a great tool for auditing your website. If you haven’t already, download Screaming Frog here

Once installed, all you have to do is enter the URL you want to audit and click the start button. It goes through every single one of your pages and looks for the following:

• Errors
• External links
• URL issues
• Duplicate pages
• Page title tags
• Meta elements
• Headings
• Rel canonical
• Internal links
• Anchor text
• Follow & Nofollow links
• Images
• and much more

Once you crawl your whole website with Screaming Frog, you can then export all of that data into a spreadsheet to help you better analyse the data.

Google Search Console

One of the best tools you can use. Better yet, it’s free! If you’re new to Google Search Console, use the guide below to get started.

• Go to Google Search Console
• If you have Google Analytics, you can login with the same details as your GA account. Alternatively, you can login with your Google account if you don’t have a GA account.
• When you’re logged in, click the big red “Add a Property” button on your right.
• Enter the URL of the website you want to see the data for, then click continue.
• You will then be asked to verify the website in either of the four following ways:

1. You can upload an HTML file if you have the root access to the website.
2. If you manage the hosting of the website, you can verify the property via your hosting provider.
3. You can verify with Google Tag Manager.
4. And the easiest method, you can verify via your Google Analytics Tracking ID.

Once this is set up, you can see everything from crawl errors, inbound links, search analytics, security issues and much more.

Search Engine Tuning

This is another great free tool that you can use to analyse your on-page SEO.

All you have to do is type your website address into the search bar, click the review button, and the website does the rest.

Your website will be graded on everything from:

• SEO
• Usability
• Mobile
• Technologies
• Social
• Visitors
• Link Analysis

Analyse your data carefully, and once you find a trend of aspects where your website can be improved, you’ll know where to start.

SUMMARY – It is not uncommon to see great results within a short period of time after fixing your website’s SEO issues.

2. Increase traffic to your website

Increasing traffic to your website can be conducted in a variety of ways from link building, content marketing to guest blogging, social media, PR, email marketing and much more.

In my opinion, if you truly want to grow your automotive business, you should be active on all platforms that will increase your traffic and increase sales – more on that later.

Traffic Sources

• Organic – An organic visitor is someone who has found your website by entering a keyword into a search engine and clicking on your organic listing.
• Direct – A direct visitor is someone who has typed your websites URL into their browser, or through an undefined channel.
• Referral – A referral visitor is someone that lands on your website by clicking on a URL on another website.
• Social – A social visitor is someone who has found your website on social media.

The importance of increasing traffic from all these sources cannot be overstated.

After all, if you put all your eggs into the organic basket, what would happen to your business if Google stopped showing results for your business?

Often, there is no one best traffic source, because it usually depends on the nature of your website.

You have to test with all the different sources to see which works best for your business and your customers.

As this post is about improving automotive SEO, we’ll show you how you can increase your organic traffic.

One great way to do this is by producing content targeting topics, not keywords.

You have to build your content with your audience in mind.

Here’s what you need to do.

1. Analyse your competition’s content page elements.
2. Create better more engaging content.

I recommend taking the top 5 results and look at the following factors.

• How many words are in the content?
• Does the content fulfil the user’s needs?
• What is the title of the content?
• How many images does the content have?
• How relevant are the page titles and meta description?
• Does the article have Schema markup?
• Can you convert?

When creating your own content, make sure you include the following tactics.

• Have better, more engaging content.
• Fulfil the user’s needs.
• Include better and more relevant images.
• Link to other relevant websites.
• Include different types of media. If the content you’re up against doesn’t have a video, add one to yours.
• Create an infographic people can link to.
• Allow users to convert.

Basically, take the content that already exists, and make it better.

SUMMARY: Test which traffic source yields the best results for your business. Once you know, increase your presence with that traffic source and watch your visitors increase in no time.

3. Turbocharge the number of high-quality backlinks

Increasing the number of high-quality backlinks to any website is still one of the most important aspects of SEO. In fact, data shows there’s a slim chance you can rank highly in search results without links. [2]

If you use the tips in the section above, you should find people want to link to your content, making it easier for you to naturally gain backlinks.

You can increase the number of high-quality backlinks pointing to your website in a variety of ways.

Effective link building strategies [3] include:

• Guest Posting
• Links to Articles
• Blogger Outreach
• Local Listings
• Product Reviews

Another great method to building backlinks is by using your competitor’s broken pages.

As with the traffic sources above, you might find all or only a couple of outreach methods work for you.

With this in mind, let’s use guest blogging as an example.

Guest blogging is a great way to gain quality back-links if done correctly.

Before you even begin guest blogging, you need to have a goal in mind. This could be to drive more traffic to your website.

If this is your goal, then you have to target blogs that will send relevant traffic to your website. There’s no point in targeting an audience that isn’t relevant to you.

Before you write a guest post for any website, you need to:

• Understand the audience of the blog
• Research the types of blogs that get featured
• Find out which blogs that get shared the most

Once you know and understand who the blog’s audience is, it’s much easier to create content that will relate to that audience, increasing your backlinks and traffic. If you employ an SEO company to do this for your brand, these are just some of the SEO services they should be providing you with. If you’re unsure, ask them!

SUMMARY: Increasing the number of high-quality backlinks to your website should be one of the main aspects of your automotive SEO strategy.