Five Ways to Generate Organic Traffic

SEO and branding; curated content and getting high rankings on SERPs; link-building, earned media and in-bound marketing. What do all these buzz words and phrases have in common? They’re all part of a larger digital marketing strategy that every company is pushing, no matter what the industry. Blogs, editorial pieces, articles and whole web sites are dedicated to explaining and teaching these techniques. So what makes this article different? It’s specific to the automotive industry with a particular emphasis for new and used car dealerships.

The automotive industry, unlike other sectors, is unique in that having a history of older models provides more selling opportunities. By presenting older models for comparison years and trims gives customers a feeling that they can’t be duped (which is anyone’s biggest fear when buying a car). Having these pages indexed properly with the right keywords can boost your online visibility, especially if they’re organized, crisp and clean without a million banners and flashy videos.

Of course research pages are part of a larger content strategy, but it’s not enough. Do you have a blog on your website? Having new and fresh content on your site on a regular basis has two significant advantages. For one, search engine crawlers will give you a higher ranking if you have new, accurate, relevant and well-written content on your website on a regular basis. Secondly, it offers buyers a chance to, once again, get educated about a major purchase: a sense of trust is established because you’re willing to share tips, present model features, and more.

For any research page and content on your website, you have to use those keywords and phrases that are being searched for the most. This type of SEO strategy is often called behavioral marketing as well because you are targeting the buying behavior and demographics of the community surrounding your business. Ask yourself: what are people searching for when they want to buy a car? What kind of demographic is arriving on the lot: subprime, millennials, retired folks? The phrases and words that you push on your website should match these perimeters.

This is another aspect of SEO strategy, but slightly different because it’s rooted in physicality, not behavior. Though research has shown that the average consumer will not travel more than a few miles to purchase something if they can get it local, research has shown that folks will drive anywhere from 50-100 miles to buy a car if the deal is good enough. Alongside pulling from the demographics of your consumer community, SEO tactics should be location-specific. Do not market your automobile dealership two states over; instead, spend your energy focusing on towns and counties nearby to get the most out of your location.

Being able to monitor and track conversions is just an important piece of this pie. Instead of picking up third-party leads that may or may not come to fruition or getting reports from all vendors, there are tools out there to track conversions and your ROI rate. Dealer Analytics, similar to Google Analytics, allows dealerships to track all of their online marketing efforts in one external, objective program. Why is this so important? You have an opportunity to track where the most traffic is coming from, where users are spending most of their time, and many more features that provide insight into what is working and what is not. Secondly, these programs provide a horizontal view of all of your online marketing efforts, so that fair comparisons can be made between strategies. The best part of these programs is that you don’t need a degree in marketing to understand any of it: you just need about ten minutes and a supportive voice to explain how it works, which Dealer Analytics provides.

You could, of course, do all of this on your own, or hire specialists who work individually to promote all these pieces. DealerLeads, on the other hand, as an aggressive digital marketing company, does all of this for dealerships all over the country, successfully, month after month. Dealers that work with us are always on the front page of SERPs, the SEO tactics are through the roof, and traffic turns into real-life conversions.

Give us a call today at (800) 710-0920 or email us at [email protected] and let us show you what we can do for your dealership website.