Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

It’s not often that Google announces when they are going to make changes to their algorithm in advance, but they did just that on Tuesday.

The latest update under the Panda name went into effect Tuesday night, Panda 3.9.  Panda was originally released in February 2011 as a way to remove low-quality content from Google’s search results.

Google made this announcement via their Twitter account:

“New data refresh of Panda starts rolling out tonight. ~1% of search results change enough to notice. To put this Panda update into perspective here’s some context: goo.gl/huekf”

Your dealership can avoid being penalized by any of the Panda updates by making sure you have high-quality content on your auto dealer website.  This means that the information is relevant, up to date, and provides the info your customers are looking for.

If you are worried about how this update may be affecting your car dealership website, talk to your dealer website provider about their search engine optimization (SEO) efforts, and what they are doing to keep your site up to date.

Google announced a few months ago that they were going to start penalizing websites that were deemed to be over-optimized for SEO as an attempt to “level the playing field”.  While many auto dealer websites shouldn’t have an issue with this (your site provider should not only be up to date on Google’s latest algorithm changes, but make sure your site is performing as well as possible), here are some things to avoid so you don’t over-optimize your website:

Keyword Stuffing: Google wants the content on your dealership to be relevant, quality, and valuable to users. This means that every other word can’t be one that you are trying to optimize for.  Use your keywords when they make sense, but don’t write choppy, difficult to read sentences just because you are trying to get more keywords on the page.

Non-Relevant Anchor Text: This is the highlighted text that website visitors click to visit another page. The anchor text should describe what is on the page that you are linking to, for example, “used Nissan Altimas” should send traffic to a page about used Nissan Altimas.  Having the same anchor text for all links, or anchor text that doesn’t accurately reflect the content of the landing page for a link is spammy and is exactly what Google is trying to penalize with this update.

Having Hidden Text: Frequently, organic search spammers create extremely keyword-heavy text that is hidden or obscured from website visitors, but visible to search engine spiders.  Again, Google wants to reward websites that give relevant information to visitors, so there isn’t much value (and potentially harm) in hiding content from visitors.  Text that is “white on white” or hidden under a “see more” layer may be penalized by Google, and could even get a site dropped from Google’s index.

As always, create your auto dealer website with your customers in mind, and the chances you’ll be penalized by Google are highly reduced.  Talk with your dealership website provider to see what SEO techniques they are using on your dealership site and how they’re making sure you’re on good terms with Google.

If you’re doing the SEO for your own auto dealer website, it can be difficult to know where to focus your energy first. Here are the pages you should start optimizing first to get the most bang for your SEO efforts:

Main Navigation Pages: Your home page and those that have direct navigation from your home page (mainly your inventory) should be optimized since they are the ones potential customers are most likely to find. Also, if people are linking to your site, they are probably linking to your homepage or inventory pages. Back up these link “votes” by optimizing these pages to help their rank in search engine results.

Your Most Profitable Vehicle Pages: Help potential customers find the vehicles that bring in the most money for your dealership. Optimizing your more expensive cars and trucks, as well as your service and parts department pages will help interested buyers find these dealership website pages first.

Your Best Performing Pages: Which of your website pages provide your dealership with the most leads, highest time on site, and lowest bounce rate? Spend some time here to help interested customers find these pages in their search engine results

If you’re using a third-party SEO company, or your car dealership website provider is responsible, make sure you ask them which pages they focus the most SEO effort and energy. While each of your dealership website pages need to be optimized for search engines, make sure your SEO provider is paying special attention to the pages that will ultimately help your dealership sell more cars.

Does your car dealership sell have more than one location?  If so, big news from Google Places.  In the past, it was difficult and cumbersome to create and manage more than one Places account.  To help their users, Google Places has created a new Bulk Listing Management Tool.

This new tool allows your dealership to edit one or more listing, search your listings (filtering by specific info or by listing with errors), and upload new listings from a data file or individually.

Google also created this video to help users become verified to bulk uploads.

Once your account is verified, the following video gives more information on how you can use the Google Places Bulk Listing Management Tool.

If you don’t manage your Google Places account, check with the person or company (maybe your auto dealer website provider) that does to ensure everything is properly optimized.

I recently found a great article that discusses very specific things businesses should be doing to help their Google Places Listing improve its ranking.  Bizible, a start-up that makes local marketing software for businesses, conducted a pretty scientific attempt to determine how best to improve the rank of your Google Places Listing.

It is also interesting because his is the first time I’ve seen a distinction between Google Places Listings for integrated search results and Google Places Listings for non-integrated search results (searches occurring directly in Google Places).

Top Factors to Improve Ranking for Pages in Integrated Results

1. Have the category of your places page match a broader category than the search.  For example, if your dealership places page is Automotive, that is a broader category than a specific make which someone may search for.

2. Have the search category appear in the name of your business.  This is great for dealerships that have the city name and make in your dealer name.

3. Make sure your search category appears in the “at a glance” section.

Top Factors to Improve Ranking for Pages Not In Integrated Results

1. Have 5 or more Google reviews.

2. Have the location in the “at a glance” section

3. Have the category term in the Google review content.  Make sure your dealership business category is in the reviews left by your customers.

4. Put the category term in the business description.

5. Make sure your category term appears in the “at a glance” section.