Car Dealership SEO Services: Get More Leads & Sell More Cars

Are your competitors overshadowing your car dealership business and stealing away people who will otherwise be your customers?

Fret not. Your business can make a glorious comeback with automotive SEO for car dealerships.

I’ll tell you why automotive SEO is the one-stop solution you need and uncover the proven strategies we use at Stan Ventures when providing automotive SEO services for car dealers.

What is Automotive SEO?

Automotive SEO is the process of optimizing websites for car dealerships, auto manufacturers, and repair shops to rank higher on search engines like Google. It helps these businesses increase online visibility, attract more organic traffic, and drive sales without relying on paid advertising.

Leveraging SEO services for car dealerships from trusted automotive SEO companies like Stan Ventures can further simplify the process for you and drive sustainable organic growth faster.

What Does Automotive SEO Matter for Car Dealerships?

Here are the specific reasons why car dealerships should invest in automotive SEO.

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High Competition

The automotive industry is very competitive, with over 18,000 dealerships and car listing websites in the US alone. It’s hard to stand out if you only use traditional marketing methods.

Auto dealership SEO helps your business show up online, bring in more leads, and get more customer inquiries.

Image-Heavy Websites

Car dealership websites usually have lots of images and videos, which can slow down loading times and drive visitors away.

Optimizing them using dealer SEO best practices leveraged by professional auto dealer SEO services can help speed up your site and make it easier for people to use. This leads to a better customer experience and keeps potential buyers on your website longer.

Fragile Local Presence

Most car buyers search online for dealerships near them. If you don’t appear for local searches, you lose customers.

By focusing on car dealer local SEO, you can dominate local search results and appear in Google’s Local-3-Pack or on Google Maps. This will bring more foot traffic to your physical store.

Decline in Physical Test Drives

Today’s car buyers often prefer watching videos instead of going for a test drive.

Creating and optimizing test drive videos for different car models ensures that you meet your audience’s preferences while gaining visibility in video search results on Google and other search engines.

How to Implement SEO for Car Dealerships: 11 Automotive SEO Tips for Car Dealers

Check out the best automotive SEO tips for car dealerships below.

1. Focus on Keyword Research

Suppose a customer is searching for “Best SUVs for Sale” on Google. If your content is not optimized for that keyword, your website won’t appear in search results.

First off, you need to identify keywords car buyers are using to find dealerships like yours online. That’s why keyword research is important.

Ranking higher in search for relevant keywords will bring more visitors to your car dealership website. This way, you will see a spike in conversions and, ultimately, car sales.

Use tools like Ahrefs or Semrush to identify keywords with a good search volume and high traffic potential.

Heads up. The higher the keyword difficulty, the more effort you need to put in to rank for the particular keyword.

Pro Tip: To start with, target long-tail keywords with a low keyword difficulty yet a moderate search volume to attract qualified leads.

For example, a long-tail keyword like “certified pre-owned cars” is a good choice.

2. Create Content Helpful for Car Buyers

Your website should be more than just a list of cars. It should help answer common questions and solve problems for potential buyers.

For example, you can create blogs, guides, videos or FAQs using topics like “Signs you need a new car” or “How to find a budget-friendly car.”

Besides attracting visitors to your website, leveraging your content to address the needs of your audience will help boost your E-E-A-T and position yourself as a trusted source of information in the car dealership industry.

This can boost your brand image incredibly.

On top of all that, Google is fond of websites boasting E-E-A-T. As a result, the search engine will offer you higher rankings, giving your website a visibility boost online.

Make sure you optimize your content with relevant keywords sprinkled naturally.

If you have trouble doing it yourself, hire a car dealer SEO company to create well-optimized content that reflects your industry expertise. As a result, your content will rank higher, reach the right people and bring more leads for your business.

3. Optimize Your Product Pages

Car dealership sites are most likely to have several product pages featuring different cars.

If a visitor lands on one of your product pages, clearly, they are considering buying that product.

Cars are high-value products. That said, it is pretty natural for your potential buyers to have specific questions about the product.

Craft every product page content in such a way that it answers potential questions customers have in mind about the specific product.

This can include a detailed product description, product specifications, warranty period, test drive video, and more. Add customer reviews and testimonials to your product pages to bolster online reputation management.

Plus, optimize product pages with relevant keywords to boost their SERP appearance for relevant searches.

For example, Edmunds, a car aggregator website, is ranking at the top for several product searches.

In fact, the list of their top-performing content is dominated by product pages.

Most car dealers fail to perfect their product page by adding eye-catching images and enticing descriptions, and they end up ranking at the bottom.

This is where car dealership SEO services come in. An expert car dealer SEO company like Stan Ventures can help you turn your inventory into ranking assets by optimizing your website’s technical aspects and creating content that lures the audience to click in.

4. Build Internal Links

Only pages indexed by the search engine appear in search results. Internal links make it easier for Google to discover and index new pages on your car dealership site.

Build a strong internal linking structure to help Google index your content faster.

Plus, internal links help your visitors easily navigate to relevant pages on your website and explore more information about cars.

This way, a well-structured internal linking strategy keeps visitors longer on your site and helps in effective conversion rate optimization.

5. Invest in Video SEO for Auto Dealerships

Creating and optimizing video content is an integral part of SEO for automotive industry websites. I’ll tell you why.

When I searched for “how to find the best SUV with good fuel efficiency” on Google, I found video results right beneath Google’s AI overviews.

That means to rank higher for a query like this one, you need to create video content.

Yes. Content types matter. You can’t create a blog or infographic for a user query prioritizing video results.

In fact, videos come in handy to demonstrate test drives, safety features and the luxury interiors of the car. This can help your potential buyers visualize owning the car and drive purchase decisions.

That makes video content a must-have for effective automotive SEO marketing.

Optimize your video titles and descriptions with relevant keywords to improve visibility in search results.

Embed videos on your product pages and share them across platforms like YouTube and other social media for a wider reach.

Also, remember your car dealership website is image-intensive. So, in addition to doing video SEO, make sure you implement image SEO best practices to optimize your images properly.

6. Optimize Your Google Business Profile

GBP optimization is widely considered a top local SEO tactic by car dealership SEO experts.

Creating and optimizing the Google Business Profile (GBP) allows you to appear in local search results, including Google Maps and Local-3-Pack.

Ensure your NAP (Name, Address, Phone number) is accurate and consistent across your website, GBP and other platforms across the web.

Update GBP information, such as photos and posts, to keep your profile fresh and updated consistently.

Additionally, highlight unique offerings like free test drives, festive discounts and more on your GBP to boost click-through rates.

As a seasoned automotive dealer SEO marketing agency, we know how much these small details matter for bigger automotive SEO outcomes. If you need professional help with end-to-end GBP optimization or other local listings, our auto dealer local SEO service is the way to go

7. Build High-Quality Backlinks

Link building for car dealers is a must. Let me tell you why.

Backlinks are endorsements from other websites to your own. They tell search engines that your site is reliable and trustworthy.

Again, take Edmunds, for example.

They’ve consistently built backlinks. From having backlinks from 32,500 referring domains, they now have 42,700 websites pointing to them. That’s over 10,000 more websites endorsing them in less than a year.

This is as well one of the reasons the website is ranking on Google’s first page for automotive searches.

You can make similar results a reality for your car dealership website too.

Focus on building high-quality, relevant backlinks from other authoritative websites, including car dealerships, car aggregator sites and review sites.

Create high-quality content that’s helpful for the audience of the external site hosting your backlink.

This can drive qualified referral traffic to your website from authoritative sources, boosting your rankings and ROI alike.

Again, if you need help building great backlinks that drive results, feel free to leverage the powerful link building services offered by our automotive SEO company. We are a team of 200+ link building experts trusted by 2500+ global brands. Our scalable link building solutions are a perfect fit for businesses of all sizes.

8. Keep Your Website Mobile-Friendly

With a majority of car buyers browsing on their phones to find the right cars, having a mobile-friendly website is mandatory for car dealer SEO.

Plus, with mobile-first indexing implemented, Google’s algorithms prioritize ranking mobile-friendly websites higher in search results.

Make sure your website loads quickly to offer a seamless user experience on smaller screens.

Use a responsive web design to ensure your inventory looks just as appealing on a smartphone as it does on desktop screens.

Check your website’s mobile friendliness using Google’s free Pagespeed Insights tool.

9. Implement Schema Markup

Implementing schema markup properly can transform how your website appears in search results.

Rich snippets featuring review stars, car specs, and pricing can grab attention and increase click-through rates.

Leverage appropriate structured data types, such as Auto, LocalBusiness, and Product,  to highlight key details and secure a spot in enhanced search results.

10. Keep Your Website Technically Healthy

Hidden technical issues can drive potential buyers away from your car dealership website and hurt your search rankings.

Regularly running technical SEO checks helps you spot and fix problems like 404 errors, broken links, duplicate content, and slow-loading pages.

Leveraging professional SEO audit services for car dealers can help you avoid the headache of dealing with complex technical SEO activities and focus more on your dealership business.

11. Measure SEO Performance

Monitoring the performance of your automotive SEO campaigns is essential to measure SEO success.

For one last time, let me show you an example from Edmunds.

Look at their organic traffic value graph steadily gliding up. That means their SEO strategy is working. Their site now boasts a monthly organic traffic value of over 12 million USD.

Implementing the right automotive SEO strategy can help you see positive results like that.

Use tools like Google Analytics, Search Console, Ahrefs and Semrush to keep track of your Automotive SEO performance.

Keep an eye on metrics like Domain Authority, keyword rankings, backlinks, clicks and impressions to measure your website’s performance and tweak your strategy accordingly.

Looking forward to building a personalized SEO strategy for your car dealership business? Book your free SEO consultation with Stan Ventures to see how our car dealer SEO services can help.