One of the biggest mistakes I see dealers make when starting out online is the failure to target “keywords” prospects are using when looking for a new or used car in the search engines.
If you are not familiar with keywords or basic SEO principles, they are simply words are phrases that describe your product or services. A few examples of good, geo-targeted keywords would be “used car dealership Philadelphia,” “PA Nissan,” or “Kia dealer New Jersey”.
So the goal of SEO, then, is to strategically work these keywords into YOUR website copy, thus giving you a better chance of being found by prospects who use these phrases during their search.
Yet how do you know what keywords your prospects are searching for in the first place? Here are 3 easy steps to find out:
- Compile a list of the keywords you THINK prospects are using to find your product or services online.
- Put together a group of friends, family…or even complete strangers and ask THEM what they would type in Google if searching for your product or services online. The simplicity of their choice may surprise you.
- Use Google’s keyword tool to plug in all of the keywords you’ve compiled above to see how much they are REALLY searched across the web. Again, the results here may surprise you.
Finally, when you’ve gathered a good list of targeted keywords, be sure to start using them on your blog, in titles, headlines, meta tags, anchor text and all over your website copy. This will help you attract more internet shoppers, and hopefully buyers, if your website is good enough to close the deal.
More on that next time.
