How Your Dealership Can Leverage Events & Sponsorships for Automotive SEO

How Your Dealership Can Leverage Events & Sponsorships for Automotive SEO

People attend events to learn something they couldn’t learn by themselves

If someone chooses to attend an event like a fundraiser, golf tournament, or luncheon, they want to be there, and they want to engage.

In 2016, more and more brands are revamping their events as examples of experience marketing. Meaning, the focus is moving to use events as a way to create exciting and interactive experiences that will attract new customers.

This concept has emerged from the digital communication landscape of today. People are choosing to experience your brand online when they hear about you or see your company sponsoring an event.

So in order to leverage this exposure, you must represent your dealership as the one people saw at an event online in a consistent and integrated manner. You must also make it as easy as possible for this highly engaged audience to find you.

How do you do that? Here’s the short answer: search engine optimization (SEO).

3 Automotive SEO Strategies for Events & Sponsorships

People are searching the Internet for answers. They use natural language to ask questions, so strategies like keyword stuffing don’t work. Search engines have gotten smarter, and your content strategy needs to as well.

Here are three ways to create valuable content for people and search engines with automotive SEO.

1. Build Up Links on Your Website

Link building is one of the best ways to build authority for your dealership’s website — and perhaps the most overlooked SEO strategy. Search engines treat links essentially as votes for reputation and importance of your website. Growing the numbers of links is critical to gaining traction and traffic. 

Just be sure to link to quality sources. If you choose to link to garbage, your website visitors will think your site is garbage — and so will search engines. Check to see that your links are working properly since your search engine ranking score will lower if your outbound links are broken.

Quality links build trust and bring higher response rates, which improve automotive SEO.

If you’re sponsoring an event, team, or organization, you should be linking to whom you’re sponsoring. Local events give you “geo-relevant” links, which are excellent for your dealership’s quality score. Plus, your competitors may not be doing this type of linking, so you’re able to set your content apart from the crowd.

But be vigilant. If the local event’s content is set to expire, their links might be too. If your links aren’t permanent, see if there’s an archived page of past events to link to instead, or make sure they have redirects set up for after the event.

2. Blog about the Event or Sponsorship

Blogging about an event or sponsorship is a wonderful way to utilize common search terms and provide further information for visitors. For annual events, in particular, blogging helps you attract visitors searching for details on the next year’s event.

Go above and beyond when creating content for large conferences. Think of what the reader would like to know, and make that content worth their time.

Besides building links and promoting the event ahead of time, don’t miss out on opportunities for engagement after the event. Give people the answers they want. Put together an event wrap-up blog post, and pepper in an assortment of links to attract attendees searching for key takeaways.

3. Get Social with Social Media

Social media allows us to connect with nearly anyone in the world.

Twitter is an especially great medium for interacting with the biggest names and events in the world as well as local public figures and community gatherings. And, with the help of event hashtags and the ability to tag businesses in tweets, your chances of people discovering your dealership’s content are that much greater.

Leveraging an event or sponsorship with social media is a quick and effective way to promote both it and your participation in it. The leads and customers who follow you on your dealership’s social networks are perhaps your biggest supporters, so spreading pre-event awareness to them can bring staggering results.

Take Your Automotive SEO One Step Further

9 Clouds SEO Webinar

If you’re not taking the time to attend at least one industry conference every year, you’re missing out on a lot of potential for your auto dealership. Here are the top 5 auto industry conferences for dealers to attend.

While we put together some great information for you here, we want you to know that this is just the tip of the iceberg. Learn how to put these practices in place by attending our upcoming free webinar on automotive SEO, hosted by our own Scott Meyer!

Scott will teach you how to create a stunning automotive SEO strategy that attracts leads to your online content. He’ll start with the basics and move to more advanced techniques.

Interested in learning more about Automotive SEO? Click the button below!

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