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Car dealerships have long understood that a high-quality website is integral to the business today. Not as many realize just how important local SEO is for their business, though. What is it, and how can it help your car dealership’s SEO plan as a whole? Take a look.

Understanding Local SEO

Local SEO helps people who are trying to find a dealership in their area connect with one nearby. Why? Let’s say that your air conditioner stops working. If you want to have it fixed, you will search for heating and air conditioning in your city. When you do this search, heating and air conditioning companies pull up in your community. This is local SEO. Alternatively, let’s say you just search “heating and air conditioning in cars.” 

Now you will pull up results that include a whole different set of results. These results might consist of articles and videos about heating and air conditioning, how to get into the heating and air conditioning business, and different problems with heaters and air conditioners. Thus, local SEO helps target your customers by bringing your car dealership to them when they search for local dealerships. 

Why It Matters

Still not sure it matters for your dealership? Take a look at the top three reasons you should integrate local SEO into your overall plan now. 

The Old Way is Out, and the New Way is In

Old ways of advertising, such as an ad in the local newspaper or in the yellow pages, are gone. The new way, which is placing on the first page of a local search on popular search engines, is in. 97% of people search online for a product or service that they want, usually within 24 hours using Google. You want your car dealership to pop up on the first page of the results when a consumer types in “car dealerships near me.”

High Conversion at Low Cost

A high price tag came with the old way of advertising, and even some of the other current advertising methods are costly. However, local SEO for car dealers is a much lower cost. Of course, you will be paying the car dealership SEO team to help, but the result means giving your Google rankings a boost, which is free. The free traffic with the boost you are giving combined with the traffic that your SEO agency is helping to bring in can quickly convert many customers walking into your dealership ready to buy a vehicle from you.

Fast Results

Companies that compete nationally and internationally are at a disadvantage compared to your car dealership. There is a 6 to 12-month lag before they start seeing Google rating improvements. You, as a car dealer, on the other hand, compete locally. Many car dealers are not yet taking advantage of local SEO. This means that you could see your car dealership on the first page of results in as little as 30 days. 

Getting It Right

Local SEO is all about keywords and key phrases. An experienced local SEO company for car dealers will have in-depth knowledge and experience in SEO, keywords, key phrases, website content, and the infrastructure of a website. A car dealership SEO team will also have expertise in the algorithms of search engines and will have the ability to optimize your Google My Business profile, helping you get into the highlighted results. 

Think you can handle it on your own? Some aspects of SEO sound easy, but so does selling a car to someone who has never sold a car before. You know all the details that go into selling a car, the details about cars, the paperwork that must be completed and how to complete it, the loan application process and how to help your customers get approved, and everything else that goes into running a car dealership efficiently.

Likewise, your team knows all of the details that go into getting your car dealership a higher listing in the local search, including keywords, key phrases, optimizing your profiles, optimizing your website, and more. 

It is possible to learn everything that your local SEO company knows. Still, you would then be spending all of your time learning that and sacrificing the time you should be spending on keeping your car dealership running and working with your employees and customers. You are the expert on selling cars, so it makes sense to hire an SEO expert to help you with the online part of your business. 

The investment you make in this expert will pay off by bringing you more customers, turning into higher revenue. If you focus your time on your customers, they are likely to come back and bring their friends and family to you, resulting in even more revenue. Hiring a local SEO for car dealers just makes sense.

Ready to get started? Contact us today.