How can Hyper Local SEO help auto dealers?
Hyper local SEO is a narrowing down your car dealerships geographic targeted area
Search Engine Optimization is crafting your website in such a way that your website ranks higher in search results. Generally speaking, this has two dimensions: general search engine optimization, which refers to the wide open spaces of the internet and positions you against every other company with the keywords you’re trying to rank for, and local search engine optimization, which places your competitive zone within your general geographic area. Hyper local SEO is an extension of the latter, narrowing down your geographic scope to a much smaller area – sometimes just a few miles or even a few blocks of your business.
The main reason to focus on hyper-local SEO is to drive traffic to your dealership
If you’re aiming to attract those people who are searching for things that are “near me,” even if they don’t type in “near me” into the search bar. This works particularly well for restaurants, coffee shops, movie theaters, or anything else where the location is a core factor.
Which is why hyper local SEO seems to make very little sense for the automotive industry
Usually, when someone purchases a car, they’ve taken some time to research, consider competing models, and have reached a general idea of what they want. But even though buying a car is not normally a “spur of the moment” type of decision, there are still several ways in which hyper-local SEO can benefit auto dealers.
1. By Allowing Customers to Test Drive Cars
Before a customer actually purchases a car, they normally take several models out for test drives to see how it performs. These can precede the car buying stage for several days or even months, but getting them in the front door and into a car for a test drive can build up a rapport with the dealership. If a customer is looking to test drive a specific car, they may very easily type into a search box, “Ford F-150 near me”; if your dealership has spent time building up their local SEO, you can expect to appear near the top of those search rankings.
2. It Can Showcase Your Reviews
These days, very few people buy something – whether in-person or online – without reading reviews first and the higher the price, the more they tend to read reviews. Buying a car is one of the biggest purchases people make in their lifetime, so chances are they will read the reviews for several auto dealers before making a decision. Even if they’re not searching for a car, you can upsell the customer on other services like tire replacements or oil changes. If your dealership has great reviews, they’ll most likely use you for more than just buying a car.
3. Separate Yourself From the Competition
Though search engine optimization has been around for a while, relatively few are focusing on the local aspect of their search rankings, and even fewer care about becoming hyper local. If you’re located in a large, metropolitan area with several dealerships in the area, having a strong hyper local strategy could mean the difference between being the first or the second result on page 1. While this may not seem like much, 18% of all organic clicks go to the first result, while only 10% go to the second. When you’re dealing with high-ticket items like cars, that extra 8% could be thousands of dollars in revenue and lost customers.
4. Local Search Engine Optimization Will Find More Qualified Buyers
People in your immediate area are not only looking to buy cars and purchase services, they’re also looking to not travel very far to do so. The automotive industry is notoriously fierce, so positioning yourself within a short distance from people’s homes or places of business could be the difference between winning their business or letting them slip to your competitors. A good local website audit from a company like Customer Scout can help reveal flaws in your online strategy, as well as provide ways for you to fix it.