Here is a quick SEO checklist / SEO Exercise for car dealers – Tune-up your website’s SEO!
1. Pick 2 Cities that you want to concentrate on dominating search for.
(example: detroit & dearborn)
2. Pick 3 Keywords.
(example: ford, car, dealer)
3. Combine the city keyword with two of the keywords you chose to make your list of keyword phrases.
(example: “detroit ford dealer” – “dearborn car dealership” – “detroit car dealer“)
4. Enter the phrase into Google and be sure to leave the quotation marks intact.
5. Under the search box, look at the number of search results. It will say “About …. results”
(example: “detroit ford dealer” has 237,000 results.
This means it will be harder to rank on page #1 of Google but it’s not impossible if you have help
If your phrase has less than 5,000 than it shouldn’t be a problem to rank very quickly by following the rest of these steps.
6. Without deleting your keyword from the Google search box, click on the far left to type in the search box so you can add site=yoururl.com
(example: site:gornoford.com “detroit ford dealer”)
Now look at the “About …. results” again. If you do not show any results that means your site will not come up when someone searches that particular phrase.
This also means you need to do some SEO ASAP. To start with, you will need to edit your site to include that phrase, preferably in the title and/or description tags.
7. Once you have added the keyword to your site it might take a few days for Google to reflect the change in the search results, but you should see your site showing up when you repeat step 6.
8. Now enter the following into the Google search bar: links:gornoford.com -”gornoford.com” and you should see sites which have linked to your URL. (This should work ok, but Google doesn’t usually show every single link so your results may vary. A good tool for this is mentioned in step 9 below.)
If you have access to edit any of these pages, then try to add your keyword phrase once in the text. The best would be to make the anchor text link pointing to your site the keyword, but that may or may not be an option available to you, just depends on the site.
9. If you haven’t already done so, setup Google Webmaster Tools here: http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/
This will help give you insight into a lot of information on how your site is performing, and it can be integrated with your Google Analytics as well.
10. Work on getting your site on page #1 of Google by creating high quality content on your site’s most important pages, such as your home page, about us page, staff page, service, parts, etc.
Take a look at your pages from a visitor’s perspective and ask if you think that someone is getting the information that they are looking for or if you are linking to another page that might give more specific information that would be helpful.
By doing these 10 steps your site will have a good basic SEO foundation and the ability to drive more organic search traffic to your site. The value in doing this is free traffic for search terms your competitors are likely paying anywhere from $2 to $8 per click.
Invest that into creating better content, and a better experience for your customers and you’ll be happy with the results.
