Yes, We Do SEO for Car Dealers and it’s Amazing

There is so much emphasis placed on innovation that sometimes the core concepts get lost in the minutia. When we started Dealer Authority in 2013, the goal was to create the premier content marketing agency that would help dealers with both social media marketing and search engine optimization as well as other aspects of their digital presence. The social media has taken off and we’re pleased to be considered a top choice by aggressive dealers. However, the fact that our SEO product is the most powerful in the industry seems to have been lost in the messaging.

Yes, we do SEO. Yes, it’s pretty darn epic when you look at the results we achieve for clients.

Our philosophy is specifically geared towards automotive SEO. Ours is an industry that requires unique specialization. Unlike most industries where SEO is mostly a function of building inbound links, dealer websites require a strong balance of onsite and offsite content to generate the right results. We need to get as many car buyers into the inventory as possible. We need to get them to the specials pages. We don’t need to send everyone to the home page, but that seems to be the focus of nearly every SEO product out there.

We’ve seen some notable exceptions and we would never say we’re the only game in town that’s doing it right. However, it seems like every single marketing company in our industry has latched onto the buzzwords of “search engine optimization” so much that it’s difficult for dealers to know what’s real and what’s not.

There are three primary components to our strategy:

1. Drive more local shoppers to the pages on the website that are converting well
2. Adjust the pages that are already getting traffic so they can convert better
3. Expand both geographically as well as from a model perspective

The first two should be no-brainers in our industry, but apparently they’re not. So many SEO services focus on the deliverables rather than the results. They tell you to look at this page that they adjusted or that page that they built. They don’t tell you that the pages they built aren’t getting traffic, aren’t generating more leads, or both. Driving traffic is easy. Driving meaningful traffic to pages that can help to turn them into sales is exponentially more difficult and it’s why we offer exclusivity to brands within a given area. We can only make one Chevy dealer in Long Beach dominant. When you work with more than one, you have to split the love and we’re simply not going to do that.

The third component, expansion, is two-fold in itself. We want to expand the market reach to include areas within striking distance that are not currently sending traffic. We also want to expand the reach of individual model pages within the area so that we can take more market share from the competitors and more search real estate from third party websites.

SEO is easy to pitch. It’s hard to do. We wouldn’t want aggressive dealers to pass on us simply because we aren’t spending tens of thousands of dollars a month advertising our services.