SEO for Car Dealerships

If someone is searching for a car dealer to buy cars from, they’re likely using Google.

So, if you want more customers walking into your dealership, the first page of Google is where you need to be.

Learn the basics of how to get there below.

Local SEO

People who search for local businesses like car dealers will usually see two types of search results: regular and "map pack."

You can rank in both of these types of results, making it possible to show up twice on the first page of Google.

To rank in the regular organic results, you'll need to optimize your website. That's what the rest of this guide focuses on. 

To rank in the "map pack," you'll need an optimized Google Business Profile.

Learn more: Local SEO: The Complete Guide

Keyword research

People won't always type "car dealerships" into Google when they need one. Some will search for more specific services like buying used cars or going for a test drive, and others will search for solutions to problems like how to buy a car.

Unless you rank for these keywords, you're missing out on potential customers.

To find automotive-related services and topics people are searching for, you'll need a keyword research tool like Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer. These tools pull keyword ideas, estimated monthly search volumes and other SEO metrics from a database of billions of keywords.

Learn more: How to Do Keyword Research for SEO

Content creation

Knowing what people are searching for is useful. But unless you create pages to target those terms, there’s little point in doing keyword research. 

For example, there are an estimated 461K monthly searches in the US for "used cars for sale."

Given that your homepage will be more of an overview of what you do, it's unlikely to rank for this term. It's more likely to rank for broader, more popular terms like "car dealers" or "car dealerships."

The same goes for questions like "how to buy a car.” If you want to rank for such terms, you need to create content to target them.

Learn more: SEO Content: The Beginner’s Guide

Link building

Backlinks are clickable links from one website to another. As they're one of Google's strongest ranking factors, getting more high-quality backlinks typically leads to higher rankings and more organic traffic. 

In fact, you'll almost always need backlinks to rank for competitive keywords.

For example, the query "how to buy a car" has a Keyword Difficulty (KD) score of 59 out of 100. As this is quite high, you'll almost certainly need backlinks to rank on the first page for this term. 

Unfortunately, link building is one of the most challenging aspects of SEO. But there are tried and tested tactics you can use to get them.

Learn more: The Beginner’s Guide to Link Building

Technical SEO

Everything above is a waste of time unless Google can find, crawl and index your pages. That's because it's impossible for them to show up in search unless they're in the index. 

For example, say you wrote a post about choosing a car to target the keyword "what car should I buy." Even if it's the most useful guide to the topic on the web, Google won't index the page if it contains this code: <meta name="robots" content="noindex" />

Luckily, it's quite unlikely that the pages you create for search will contain that code. But there are plenty of other common technical issues that can hinder the performance of your pages in search.

You can find these issues by regularly auditing your site.

Learn more: The Beginner’s Guide to Technical SEO