Automotive SEO Optimization: Desert Bad Keywords

By Ryan Woodard on 02/10/16
Updated on 01/29/19

We have a quick automotive SEO activity for you. It will only take 20 seconds of your time — we promise. We want to help you desert keywords that your customers aren’t searching.

Pretend that you need an oil change for your car, and you don’t have a regular mechanic. Use Google to find one in your area (let’s say you live in Chicago).

What’d You Google?

What did you Google? Odds are, you didn’t search “car service in Chicago.”

Our guess is you typed either “oil change in Chicago” or “oil change near me.” Or perhaps “auto repair in Chicago.”

We could be wrong, but statistically, the odds are in our favor. That’s because people across Google nation associate “car service” with Uber or a taxi, not an auto dealership. They associate “oil change” with servicing their car or truck.

They’re also much more likely to use the term “auto repair” than “car repair” when seeking out a mechanic. These trends can be identified by keeping an eye on your Moz or Google Search Console accounts.

Thus begins your mission of optimizing your dealership’s website for automotive SEO, which will help you embrace automotive inbound marketing.

4 Ways to Optimize for Automotive SEO

Let’s start with your service department. Here are four ways to optimize your service department for automotive SEO.

Service Your Service Page

You can research service terms on your own if you wish, but for the purposes of this post, we’ll use three terms that we know are highly searched:

Oil change
Tires
Auto repair

Go to your service page. Do you use the words “service” and “car service” without mentioning “oil change” or “tires”? If so, you should make some changes.

From the top down — and we’re talking page titles, meta descriptions, alt text, and header — your service page should be optimized for the words people are actually searching.

Don’t Feel Obligated to Rebrand

Your service department is probably branded already, with a name like “The Vandelay Auto Service Center.” That’s fine – you don’t need to rebrand it as the “Vandelay Oil Change Center.”

But what you can do is work these more popular automotive SEO terms into your website copy. Use them wherever you can without drastically changing your branding or content.

Also, customize those terms to your city. Remember when you searched for an “oil change in Chicago”? Your customers are doing the same. So on your service department page, talk about how you offer an “oil change in [your city]” or “tires in [your city].”

Create Separate Pages for SEO Terms

If you don’t have separate pages for the terms “oil change,” “tires,” and “auto repair,” you should.

The more optimized pages you build into your website, the better you’ll rank for the automotive SEO terms you’re after. You can add them as drop-down options from your main service page.

Adding more pages means you have more opportunities to use keywords in each page title, meta description, alt text, and header.

Blog Actively

Blogging is another great way to work these terms into your site.

Write posts containing service specials or general car advice, and use the important keywords we mentioned. Remember, every optimized page on your site counts, whether it’s a regular website page or a blog entry.

If you want to know more about blogging for auto dealers, read our post on how to get started blogging.