Car Dealer New Year’s Resolution#1 – Do the SEO Website Audit
Who will deny the necessity of the MOT (Ministry of Transport) test? Though it takes time and costs money, car owners are willing to do it being aware of the risks involved. Think of a website audit as the vehicle test. Skipping the MOT implies dangerous driving and a large fine; skipping the website audit can lower your rankings and thereby jeopardize your income. Also, some oversights can incur a Google penalty.
Let’s figure everything out.
What is the car dealer website audit?
A website audit is a comprehensive examination of all the factors that affect your website visibility in SERPs (search engines result pages). Run the website audit to detect any weak points in your online showroom in terms of ranking. Search engines, the big G in particular, revise their ranking algorithms constantly: brand-new factors are added, old ones are being transformed. The audit allows you to understand whether your website meet these requirements or not and what should be improved.
What purpose does it serve?
The website audit as a part of car dealer SEO is a huge step towards better rankings, more organic traffic (just keep in mind that 90% of all the clicks go to organic traffic) and more sales. Are you getting interested?
What does it consist of?
Page optimization
On-site optimization helps both search engines and users better understand what the page is about. A basic check includes:
- Content. If your content is poor, duplicated and uninformative, it’ll result in a high bounce rate. How much better if the titles of your articles are not just attractive, but actually compement the material, search engines will spot positive user behavior and rank you higher.
- Images optimization. Every image on your car dealer website should be tagged with an alt attribute. It is a text alternative of a picture. In case images can’t be displayed properly, an alt tag will show what the picture describes.
- Headings. HTML headings like h1, h2, h3 help web crawlers to determine the structure of the page.
- Broken links. They are internal/external links that lead users to nowhere. Such links should be either removed or redirected.
- Meta descriptions. Every page should be described by metadata. These descriptions show what the page is about and should be unique for each one.
Usability
Is your website usable for visitors? The answer depends on many factors but the main ones are:
- Page speed. If your website takes longer than 5 seconds to load, we have bad news for you. People won’t wait, they will switch to your competition.
- URL length. Long URLs, spammy URLs, URLs that don’t match page titles – all of these can turn off customers and search engines as well.
- Data structuring. Structured data is an on-page markup that helps search engines decipher information faster.
- Custom 404 page. “Not found” messages can be very frustrating for users. Custom 404 pages help visitors find what they want and then proceed with exploring your website further instead of abandoning it.
Mobile Compliance
Even if you ignore developing a mobile-friendly website, Google won’t ignore it. The big G has a penalty for non-mobile-friendly websites. Mobile browsing is getting more prominent year-after-year and search engines are trying to provide searchers with the most suitable content possible. The audit will check whether your website :
- Is responsive
- Has high load speed on mobile devices
- Utilizes viewport meta tags.
This is just a brief list of the points that car dealer website audits cover. Also, it checks whether you have a social media presence, what technologies your website uses and many other big and little things which affect your search engines ranking. Once the audit is completed, you get a full report about the performance of your online dealership.
In order to fix something you need to know what is broken. The audit shows the way things stand in terms of car dealer SEO. We recommend an annual check for small/medium size showrooms and bi-annually for the large ones.
Autoxloo have a gift for every car dealer! We’ll check your dealership website SEO effectiveness absolutely for FREE! Contact us today to achieve better rankings and sell more vehicles this year.
