A Dealer’s Guide to SEO and How it Can Help Your Business!

SEO (search engine optimisation) should be used to ensure that websites can be found in search engines for phrases and specific words that are relevant to whatever the site is offering. It’s a little bit like quality control for websites and making sure that only the best ones for a certain subject are pushed to the top of a search results page.

There are a lot of SEO companies out there who regularly try to baffle our dealers with science and confuse them into thinking it’s more complicated than it actually is! We’ve had people come out of meetings with so called SEO gurus which have lasted two hours and then they’re none the wiser for the experience!

With all that in mind, here at Click Dealer we thought that we’d put together a quick post to help our customers understand SEO a little bit better!

What is SEO?

SEO is the process of adapting a website to improve its chances of appearing at a higher rank on the search engine results page (SERP).

Achieving a higher rank will increase your exposure and the web traffic you receive, which should result in improved sales and conversion rates, so in short SEO can be highly beneficial.

Before purchasing a car or automotive services, it is likely that the consumer will go through a rigorous research process to ensure that they will be satisfied. In terms of SEO, this means that there will be plenty of opportunity to promote your business and what it has to offer.

On-Page SEO: Meta Tags

Effective meta tags are vital for SEO. They exist in code, providing information about the content of a page. When a search engine crawls web pages, it initially encounters the title tag. If it fails to recognise it as relevant to the search query, the web page will be disregarded. Therefore, it is a good idea to use keywords that will match what people search for.

The title also appears on the SERP (search engine results page). As the first thing search engine users will see, it is important that the title is attention-grabbing and relevant to what they are looking for, telling them exactly what they can expect to find on the page.

Beneath the title, users will find a meta description, which consists of 160 characters on average, briefly providing information about the content on the web page. Again, this needs to appeal to the target audience and convince them to open the page, which will improve the click-through rate.

There are other tags used on web pages which can have a significant impact on SEO. Search engines use header tags to determine the relevance of your content, so these must be accurate summaries. It can be useful to include keywords again here. Alt tags are also important, as images and animations may be ignored by search engines, so it is necessary to include alt tags (a text alternative) with these.

On-Page SEO: Keywords

Incorporating keywords throughout the titles and content of your web page is a fundamental part of SEO. Keywords must be tailored to the automotive products and services that your company offers so that search engines recognise your site as relevant.

The more specific the keywords are, the less competition there will be for them. You can find free keyword planning tools online, which can estimate the search volume and the amount of competition you can expect to face for a certain keyword.

Off-Page SEO

There are also ways you can improve SEO externally, primarily, increasing referral traffic. Gaining links to your website or page from reputable sites can boost your incoming web traffic. These backlinks will increase your reputation and credibility from the perspective of search engines.

To obtain these backlinks, you may want to consider submitting your website to business directories relevant to the automotive industry, but be sure to check that the directory: is of high quality, allows a link to your site and receives a large volume of traffic. You may also have contacts within the industry who you could consider pitching your site to for them to provide a link for.

Alternatively, to gain links naturally, you could write content for your site about your products, services, business and the automotive industry, keeping it updated and relevant. Valuable, well-written content is more likely to be linked to.

For more information on how Click Dealer can help improve your website SEO contact us today on marketing@clickdealer.co.uk or by calling 01782 904 715.