With all the expenses that come with owning, operating, and promoting your used car dealership, it’s worth asking: Is it really necessary to invest in an SEO endeavor?
The short answer is yes. SEO can benefit your used car business in several ways. Here are four of the most significant perks.
SEO Drives Organic Traffic
We’ll start with the most obvious benefit: If you want local buyers to find your dealership website, you have to invest in search engine optimization. That’s because, most of the time, organic search is the primary source of website traffic.
In fact, it’s reasonable to say that Google accounts for around 75 percent of your brand’s visibility, if not more than that. Without a solid Google ranking, then, your brand could be mostly invisible, which means you’ll lose out on potential conversion opportunities to other local dealerships.
The bottom line: Most consumers use Google to research vehicles and dealerships. SEO is how you turn that research into sales opportunities for your dealership.
SEO Boosts Credibility and Establishes Trust
Another important reason to invest in SEO: It lends prestige to your brand and makes it easier for users to trust you.
That’s because optimizing your site for search rankings requires you to build quality content, develop strong backlinks, and ensure that your site offers a positive user experience. All of this helps your site appear more professional and more trustworthy—and that reflects on your brand as a whole.
SEO Helps You Engage Local Buyers
These days, all SEO is local. When you invest in optimizing your site, it makes that site easier for local consumers to “discover” via their mobile device. So, if John and Sarah are in the car running errands and decide on a whim to go browse used vehicles, and if they do a quick Google search for local car lots, it’s helpful if yours is one of the ones they come across.
An investment in SEO makes that happen, and the result is more foot traffic, along with more chances to close a sale.
SEO Helps Bring the Rest of Your Marketing into Alignment
No matter what else you’re doing to market your dealership—PPC, social media, video, you name it—your website is the central hub, the home base of all your marketing efforts. Chances are, you’re trying to send traffic to your website in order to generate conversions—so why not make your website as strong as possible?
That’s one of the by-products of SEO. Again, SEO requires you to hone your content, your UX, and beyond—all of it making your dealership website a more valuable marketing asset.
These are just a few of the reasons why an investment in SEO makes sense for your used car dealership. To learn more about the best strategies for marketing your business, reach out to the automotive marketing experts at Get My Auto. Contact us to schedule a consultation today!