Automotive SEO has come a long way from the days of keyword stuffing to high-quality, informative, and authoritative content that ranks high on search engines.

As artificial intelligence enters every aspect of our lives, we see it make its way into SEO practices and search results. AI is often used to help with predictive search texts and creative methods to bring users results that are helpful and useful based on their search terms. In the automotive world, dealerships face extremely high competition, have image-heavy web pages, and must cater to a local and changing audience.

Here are a few important automotive SEO tips and best practices.

Localized SEO is the key to success

Most car shoppers don’t leave their local area to buy cars unless those cars can be delivered to them. The vast majority of car sales take place at dealerships and not online with one-on-one processes. That said, the beginning of the process often begins online with research and connectivity. Using local SEO terms and a complete Google Business Profile allows a dealership’s website to rank near the top of the page, where many users will see the company that has the right cars for sale.

Use local backlinks

Backlinks connect your website to other businesses. You need to have relevance when linking to another company, but if you create blog posts regarding local community events or sponsoring businesses, this can be pretty easy. Using backlinks in your automotive SEO strategy gives your pages more power and authority in the local area. The more you can link to other companies in your area, the more useful your dealership’s website and its pages can be for your potential customers.

Reviews are more important than ever

It’s important that you ask every happy shopper for a review of your sales team and your dealership. These positive reviews help your Google search page and build confidence in your dealership with your future customer base. Don’t pay for fake reviews; these can easily be spotted by customers who are reading your reviews and can sometimes be tossed out by Google or other search engines. There should be a good mix of reviews, from good to bad. If your dealership receives bad reviews, make sure you address the customer’s concerns and post comments showing your actions.

Long-tail keywords are great

Your automotive SEO strategy needs to include more long-tail keywords that are highly specific terms that apply to your content. These longer terms often have lower search volumes than short-tail keywords, but the two types can work together to make up a huge portion of the search volume for your local market. When it comes to searching for cars, the long-tail keywords could include the age, model, and local area to create a much more specific search target.

Maximize your internal links

The internal links in your webpage allow users to navigate around your website to find what they are looking for. If your site structure is complicated, your internal linking strategy becomes much more important. Your internal links should be completed using anchor text that describes the content on the page that it’s linked to, giving the user a snippet of what to expect. Link to your most important pages from a main navigation bar that appears on every page, giving your visitors an easy way to get back to these pages.

Review your mobile experience regularly

Perform regular checks of the mobile part of your website to ensure its just as useful on a mobile device as a desktop or laptop computer. By now, you should be using a mobile-first indexing process as part of your automotive SEO strategy and designing your web pages for mobile devices should be a priority for your digital marketing team. Most of the customer touchpoints in the automotive industry are through mobile devices, which makes mobile extremely important.

Create detailed product pages

You can use canned and already prepared product pages for the vehicles you sell, but you might want to get a little more specific and detailed about questions that might arise. If you can answer customer questions before they are asked, this will put your pages ahead of others and make it much easier for your shoppers to gain the desired information from your site. If all you use are the same pages as other dealerships, you’re not going to stand out in the crowd.

These are only a few of the top automotive SEO tips and best practices to help bring your car dealership website to the top of search engines.