Navigating SEO is a DrivingSales.com exclusive series by Timothy Martell, CEO of Wikimotive. In this series, Tim breaks down ways dealers can improve their SEO and offers insight into how it will benefit business.

"Deadly" might be overdoing it, but the items covered within this post are most certainly sins of automotive SEO. Over the years, I've worked with countless number of dealers and learned a lot about how they think when it comes to SEO.

Given that experience, I wanted to address a few issues that might be holding back your SEO results, or preventing the work from getting started. So whether you're looking for ways to improve your digital marketing or looking for reasons previous SEO campaigns failed, I'll offer wisdom to get you on the right track toward success.

Lust: It Leads to Poorly-Executed Shortcuts

I really can't blame any dealer for lusting after quick results. The problem is, this often leads to shortcuts being taken. Not a bad thing if you're on a long road trip, but the only thing that comes from shortcuts with SEO is trouble.

There are plenty of SEO companies that claim to provide rankings increases for incredibly affordable prices. You know when a deal is too good to be true, though, and this is almost always the case with companies that provide low-priced services with guaranteed results.

I'm opening up about this issue because the shortcuts taken by these types of SEO companies can seriously harm your site's ability to be found in search. That's not something to take lightly, either. Google has guidelines and active algorithm updates in place to thwart the type of behavior from sites that manipulate rankings, and they're not afraid to penalize you in order to make their point.

Envy: Wishing You Outranked All of Your Competitors

No matter what business you're in, you always want to outdo the competition. And I want this for every dealer, even if I don't work directly with you.

With SEO, however, this leads to envying the search rankings of your competitors. Again, I can't blame any dealer for wanting to rank #1 for every valuable keyword in their market. The only problem is, individual keyword rankings are an outdated focus, especially with the adoption of localized and personalized search. This means different users see different results.

I discussed this in detail in one of my most recent posts, but I want to reiterate: the focus of your SEO should ultimately be on overall organic traffic growth and leads generated from your website. Because at the end of the day, those metrics mean more sales over time.

Sloth: Thinking You Can Succeed Online without Hard Work

This industry is made up of some of the hardest working people in the U.S. We thrive on success and seeing our businesses grow. Most of all, we know that cars don't sell themselves.

In an industry that's becoming more and more dominated by digital, why do some dealers think they can succeed just by having a website? Come on! You can't just open your doors at a new dealership and start selling 300 cars a month. (Unless you have a lot of friends in the market for a car.)

So why is it that so many dealers think that way about their website? This isn't Field of Dreams, people. You have to build it (using current standards), optimize it (so it's more easily discoverable in search), and market it (using content and social media) in order for the people to come.

What is your dealership currently doing to increase organic traffic? Share your story in the comments below and let's get a discussion going!

While I normally use this column to discuss ways car dealers can improve their sites' SEO, this week I want to change it up and reach out to automotive digital marketers.

Recently I read a blog post on Moz.com that discussed the changing SEO landscape. The author, Ryan Stewart, was frustrated that most SEO clients simply don't understand that Google is evolving each and every day. He dislikes having to explain that their expectations need to change in order for him to help them.

One example he gave is keyword rankings. It's no longer easy to manipulate rankings, as Google has put penalties in place to discourage unnatural SEO tactics that were once common. Beyond that, with personalized and localized search, individual keyword rankings are becoming less and less important in the grand scheme of SEO.

But the problem here isn't client expectations. The problem is, we're not doing enough to educate clients in order to ensure their expectations adapt to the current SEO landscape. Because if we were, Ryan wouldn't be so frustrated. He'd simply be able to explain to clients how SEO has changed, what services he can offer, and how those services will provide great results.

I don't blame Ryan for his frustrations, though. I know he's doing all he can to provide quality service and educate clients. He's making a plea to anyone and everyone who sells SEO services to help further the industry by informing potential clients that they're looking at SEO in an outdated fashion. This is the same plea I'm making to you today.

Here's how I think we can work together to ensure our dealer clients better understand automotive SEO, but also shape expectations for an industry that's always evolving.

Change How You Market Your Services

The old "We'll get you to page 1" strategy is completely worthless in 2015. Not only because you can't make that guarantee, but because you're perpetuating the idea that rankings are the most important part of SEO.

In order to move forward and continue to grow, we all need to change how we market SEO services to clients. This means explaining on your website and in other marketing copy what exactly SEO is and isn't. It's easy to make claims, but when you can't back them up because they're outdated you don't just hurt yourself. You hurt the industry as a whole.

If this doesn't happen, Ryan's prediction could come true: we could run ourselves out of business.

Have a Plan for When Clients/Potentials Clients Bring Up Keyword Rankings

We all want to give the client what they want, but we need to draw the line when it's simply not possible to guarantee results. I don't care how good you think your company is at SEO; you can't guarantee keyword rankings in 2015. (And if you can, you're probably employing some risky tactics that could seriously harm your client's site should Google catch on.)

This is why you need a plan to explain the changing SEO landscape to clients and how you plan to get results using the most up-to-date and advanced tactics. For Wikimotive, our focus is on boosting organic traffic as a whole. We do this by identifying new opportunities and keeping a close eye on drop offs in previous results to ensure our clients see steady growth.

By focusing solely on keyword rankings, we'd be limiting our ability to both provide results and satisfy clients. So let's show car dealers our plan for helping them grow without relying on outdated tactics.

Show Examples of Your Success

The only thing that matters in SEO is results, so let those do the real convincing for you when clients question your tactics. Explain your strategy involved with each example and step them through exactly how it all worked to provide results.

Need I say more on that topic?

Where Do We Go From Here?

Ultimately, that's up to each of us as individual businesses. I know that I want to continue innovating and creating the best SEO service I can for car dealers in order to help them grow. It's never going to be easy, but did any of us get into this business because it was easy? It's challenging, always changing, and always interesting at the same time.

I'd love to hear how other digital marketers feel about this, so please leave any and all comments below!

Navigating SEO is a DrivingSales.com exclusive series by Timothy Martell, CEO of Wikimotive. In this series, Tim breaks down ways dealers can improve their SEO and offers insight into how it will benefit business.

While there are thousands of articles that talk about search ranking factors, the majority of your site's success will come down to a few core factors. Ensuring you've got those boxes checked is what ultimately allows you to have the best search presence in your market.

In this post, I'll go over four of the most important factors that determine SEO success for car dealers, while offering tips and tricks to help you improve your site, grow organic traffic consistently, and sell more cars as a result.

Website Architecture

By now, you all know how important it is to actually have a website. There's just no contesting this in 2015. But beyond simply having a website, it's important that your site is developed and designed to allow it to comply with current web standards and search engine guidelines, load quickly, navigate users to their intended destination, and foster conversions.

None of these are simple, but they are the difference makers between a high quality and low quality website. If you're settling for a low quality website, that's the equivalent of settling for a beater over a brand new car. Sure, the beater may get you from point A to point B, but it's also prone to problems unlike a brand new car.

Upgrading your website is no different than upgrading to a new car. With your website, age starts to show and things don't work as well as they used to in previous years. Standards change, so your performance is going to suffer when compared to sites that have adapted to changes.

With automotive websites, this includes responsive design, advanced schema markup, and  canonicalization. These aren't optional parts of your site's architecture if you want to continue to grow traffic, so get in touch with your website provider immediately to ensure your site isn't left behind by changing web standards. 

Clean Metadata and Keyword Focus

One of the biggest problems Wikimotive has consistently come across with dealer websites is a lack of clean, optimized metadata.

What do I mean by clean?

Clean metadata uses natural language, steers clear of stuffing keywords, and stays within the 60-character limit. Below are a couple of examples of how the title tag of a dealership homepage should and shouldn't be written:

• Clean: Rindge, NH Jeep Dealership - Wiki Jeep

• Not Clean: Rindge, NH Jeep | New and Used Cars NH | Wiki Jeep Serving Jaffery, NH

Unfortunately, we see way too many title tags that look like our unclean example above. This might have worked for SEO ten years ago, but over-optimizing a title tag won't boost your rankings in 2015.

It's important to also note that meta descriptions--the two lines of text that appear on search result pages--don't actually affect Google search rankings. But that doesn't mean they're not important, as they can affect user CTR. If you're not writing unique descriptions to properly pitch and describe your content, you could be losing traffic without even knowing.

Finally, make sure the keywords you're targeting in title tags are high-volume by checking local data through Google's Keyword Planner tool. With tags and descriptions, you should only try to focus on one keyword per page. Other similar keywords can be targeted within the main content of a page.

Nailing Intent for Content and Other Pages

Since Google's Hummingbird update of 2013, page intent has been one of the most important factors in SEO success. What this means is, pages need purpose. You can't simply add keyword-optimized content and expect results anymore.

Instead, you have to think about why someone would visit your page, craft your content for that specific purpose, and optimize it for keywords that match the intent. While this can be tricky, Wikimotive has discovered that there are two types of content for car dealers: informational and transactional.

For informational keywords, such as "reasons to buy a used car," users aren't looking to hear about your amazing used car inventory. They simply want to be provided with a few compelling reasons to buy a used car (presumably over a new car).

Transactional keywords are those associated with some type of business or purchase. For dealers that cater to bad credit buyers, you might have a page that focuses on "Bad Credit Car Loans in [CITY, STATE]." On this page, you'll want to talk about how your dealership handles bad credit loans and why loan seekers should choose to do business with you.

Even if your page isn't necessarily a "content" page, it's still important to nail the intent. For dealerships, a great example would be service scheduling. If you have a schedule service page, this should include contact information or a tool that allows for online scheduling. A main "Service" page might describe your service business and what you provide, which then links to the schedule service page.

As you audit your site, intent should always be on your mind. By improving this, you'll not only achieve more organic traffic, but that traffic will convert better thanks to the changes made.

Quality and Relevancy of Inbound Links

In the past few years, Google has drastically changed the way digital marketers and businesses have to approach SEO in almost every single way. One of the most sweeping changes was made to links and how Google views their authority.

The search engine giant has been able to tell the difference between an authoritative site and a non-authoritative site for a long time, thanks to its PageRank system. But many experts now believe that Google is taking quality and relevancy into account at a deeper level in order to better pass link authority.

So it's not enough to just acquire links from a variety of sites. You have to think about the quality of the site overall , the quality of the page on the site that hosts the link, and how relevant its content is to your site. This does make proper linkbuilding much more difficult of a task for both marketers and businesses, but it also means the reward is much sweeter.

Have questions about recent Google changes or other ways you can help your dealership succeed in search? Let's start a discussion in the comments below!

Navigating SEO is a DrivingSales.com exclusive series by Timothy Martell, CEO of Wikimotive. In this series, Tim breaks down ways dealers can improve their SEO and offers insight into how it will benefit business.

While an extremely critical component to modern SEO, content is also a critical part of a balanced social media strategy.

That's great and all, but you're probably asking: "What does creating content for social media have to do with SEO?"

Let's find out!

Why Content Matters on Social Media (and its effect on SEO)

Helps Diversify Social Media Posts

Facebook's algorithm loves diversity, so by switching up the type of post (between status, image, link) you're giving the social network what it wants. This will help your posts perform better in order to reach the most people.

Boosts Social Results Through Engagement

Increasing engagement on your social profiles should be the goal of every business. By creating content people want to click through to and share, you're not only helping your drive traffic to your website, you're reaching local people who might have otherwise never found your business.

(You do this by promoting content only to users in your local area. Shares from paid views will be supplemented by organic views from those original shares. As long as you're creating great content, you should receive a ton of free organic social traffic.)

Social Signals Correlate High Rankings

Searchmetrics ranking factors data for 2015 shows that the amount of engagement correlates with high rankings on Google. The average number of Facebook likes and shares (combined) among the top 10 results in the SERPs is 6,504. In the top 30, this drops to 2,869.

Moz, in its 2015 ranking factors survey, also found experts believe that engagement with content on social media sites influences rankings.

Google has stated it does not use data from social media sites in its algorithm, but more social engagement around pages could have indirect effects that help highly-shared pages' search engine rankings.

Whether directly or indirectly affecting rankings, its clear that social engagement has an impact on SEO. You can choose to ignore it, but that only opens the door for your competitors to gain an edge.

How to Create Content for Social

Research Popular Topics Related to Your Brands

In order to effectively use content to enhance your social media strategy, you need to understand what your audience is most interested in reading. You can do this a number of different ways, but the most accurate path is researching keywords using the Adwords Keyword Planner.

Start by changing your target area to your local metro or state, depending on the sample audience you'd like to draw on. I recommend this be close to your actual customer base, as this will paint the clearest picture of popular brand searches among people in your area.

As an example, I searched "2015 Chevrolet" targeting New Hampshire searchers. After filtering the results to show the highest volume keywords first, I was able to get a list of the most popular new 2015 Chevy models in my local area:

• Colorado
• Silverado
• Tahoe
• Cruze
• Impala

Doing the same search for upcoming 2016 models, the Volt, Cruze, Malibu, and Camaro were among the most popular.

While this information is valuable in getting to know our local audience, we'll need to dig deeper into each model to get unique ideas that our social media audience will love.

Creating Social Media-Friendly Content

What is Social Media-Friendly Content?

Unlike search engine users, social media users aren't coming to you for information based on a query they provided Google. They're browsing Facebook, Twitter, and other sites looking for interesting content and updates from their friends.

This means you have to understand what they want to read beforehand in order to gain clickthroughs and other engagement. But how do you do that?

You have to catch their attention. For instance, "2016 Chevrolet Volt Overview" isn't really going to jump out and grab the reader. It might be a good title if you're looking to target that keyword in search, but it's likely going to be scanned over by most social media users without a second thought.

So how do we make this idea social media friendly? Let's think about the original content.

A vehicle overview page tends to just state a lot of facts about a model, so why not include "facts" in our new title. People love to be informed, so this is a good start.

And because we're dealing with specific items (facts), we can narrow that down to a numbered list. Social media users are drawn to lists because they're simple and easy to digest. For this piece of content, let's settle for five items.

"5 Facts About the 2016 Chevy Volt."

While not a bad title, it's not something that stands out as much as we'd like. This is why we need an adjective to describe these facts. It needs to be something that both catches attention and relates to the Volt.  How about "electrifying?"

We're on the right track. Now, let's think of a hook for the end. Here's what I ended up with:

"5 Electrifying Facts That Make the 2016 Chevy Volt a Must-Buy."

With this content, you're taking an otherwise boring format, cleaning it up for accessibility and making it stand out. This is the essence of social media-friendly content.

At the end of the day, you'll have content that is not only ready for action on social, but a valuable page that will help you gain more authority and search traffic over time.

Have any questions about content and how it affects SEO and social? Let's talk in the comments below!

Navigating SEO is a DrivingSales.com exclusive series by Timothy Martell, CEO of Wikimotive. In this series, Tim breaks down ways dealers can improve their SEO and offers insight into how it will benefit business.

In business, you are your reputation. And if your reputation is suffering, you're losing business. That's because the first thing people often see associated with your dealership is reviews. Google prominently displays reviews in local search packs, which provide users with an easy way of finding local businesses based on their search query. (A search for "car dealers in [CITY/STATE]" will pull this up on your screen.)

If you're showing up here and your reviews show a low rating, how do you think that's going to affect consumer perception?

Even if you show up first, you're going to lose a lot of visitors to the bottom two results because your reviews are worse. Nobody wants to buy a product that has bad reviews, and they certainly don't want to make one of their biggest purchases from a dealership with a low overall rating.

But that's just consumer perception, right? How do bad reviews actually affect your local SEO rankings and traffic? Let's find out!

Bad Reviews Hurt CTR in Local Packs

In a recent post on Moz, Casey Meraz performed a few click-through tests with ten everyday people. Each were given a scenario and instructions to search for a type of business via Google and pick the business they'd choose based on the scenario.

Most immediately jumped into action, reading the local packs first. But instead of just blindly clicking on the first result, they looked at the businesses' ratings and ultimately made a decision based on which business had the best rating in the local pack.

For dealerships, this information should be eye opening. Because when someone searches for car dealers in your area, many of those people are going to visit the site with the best reviews. It doesn't matter if you're in the #1 spot or the #3 spot in the local pack, high ratings attract clicks.

On top of this, you should know that the number of reviews also affects your conversion rate. After analyzing 2.5 million online reviews, Reevoo, a company that provides independent ratings and review software, found that adding more reviews actually increases your overall conversion rate. In their example, 10 reviews averaged a 3.0% conversion rate, while 50 reviews averaged a 4.0% conversion. Reevoo also mentioned that there was no cap to this advantage. The more reviews a site garnered, the better the conversion rate.

Google Wants to Display the Best Businesses

You'd think a poor rating affecting your overall CTR would be enough pain and suffering, but that's not the Google way. The company isn't in the business of displaying bad results, and they certainly don't want to show results that people skip over.

While still heavily debated amongst SEO professionals, most industry experts agree that click-through rate is a ranking factor. In fact, Google's former search quality chief, Udi Manber, testified this to the FTC:

"The ranking itself is affected by the click data. If we discover that, for a particular query, hypothetically, 80 percent of people click on Result No.2 and only 10 percent click on Result No. 1, after a while we figure probably Result 2 is the one people want. So we'll switch it."

You might also think that Google is somehow using the review ratings as a ranking factor, but that's not the case. By design, the click-through rate data takes care of poor results, including businesses with bad reviews.

Instead, for increased local pack rankings, you want to concentrate on the quantity, velocity, and diversity. This means you want a lot of reviews coming in regularly from a variety of sources.

And now the question is, how do you accomplish that?

Create a System for Receiving Online Reviews and Respond to Negative Reviews

The funny thing about reviews is, we all use them to make decisions on purchases but most of us never think to leave one of our own. So an easy way to start receiving more online reviews is to simply ask your customers.

An easy way to do this is to have automated emails sent out from your salespeople asking their customers to follow up with any issues and politely ask them to leave a review on one of their favorite sites, linking to Google, Facebook, Cars.com, Yelp, etc. These are the reviews that typically come up on page one results when searching your business's name, so it's best to send people to those sites in order to build up reviews.

It's an incredibly simple way to help your dealership's reputation and build trust with car buyers.

And finally, don't just ignore negative reviews as if they'll go away with time. People look for negative reviews because they expect quality service. They want to know about the bad experiences people have had so they find a reason to visit another store. You might not be able to sway everyone, but by responding to a bad review, you can show potential customers that your business takes complaints very seriously and strives to improve.

Don't worry, I'm not just saying this: it's backed up by data. A Bazaarvoice study showed that 7 out 10 reviewers changed their opinion about a business after seeing a response to a negative review. All you have to do to salvage your relationship with these car buyers is let them know you care!

Have a question about online reviews? Did your dealership have success improving its online presence through reviews? Let's talk in the comments below!

Navigating SEO is a DrivingSales.com exclusive series by Timothy Martell, CEO of Wikimotive. In this series, Tim breaks down ways dealers can improve their SEO and offers insight into how it will benefit business.

I have no doubt that the goal of most business owners is to stand out from the crowd and beat the competition while building/maintaining profit. Most of you can probably think of ways to successful market offline, but how do you stand out online in order to win over more customers?

The absolute essential, and one of the most executable, ways is through content. Not only is content the foundation of any killer SEO strategy, it's also the face of your company online. And because most people start the car buying process online, it can mean the difference between gaining or losing a customer.

Here are a few of the actionable ways you can start creating content to help your site stand out from the competition:

See What Your Competitors Have Published

In order to make your content stand out, you've got to know what others are publishing. Don't go into this with the mindset of a dealer researching the competition, though. Put yourself in the shoes of a customer.

If you're looking at a service department page, what would you want to know from that dealership? Is their content answering all of your questions? If not, make a note to ensure your service department page doesn't make those same mistakes.

You should also take notes on positive things you see from the competition's content. You not only want to capitalize on their failures, but emulate their success as well. 

Get to Know Your Audience

One of the most important aspects of creating content is understanding your audience? Who am writing for? What do they want to know? What's the purpose of this content? If you can't answer those three questions for every single page on your site, something's wrong.

As car dealers, you interact with customers every single day and probably know more about them than you might think. Ask your sales staff to tell you a few of the questions and comments people have about specific models. Ask the service department about concerns most people have with regular maintenance and repairs. And finally, ask the financing team to help you better understand your customers' situations when they're having trouble getting approved for a loan.

By getting to know who your customers are, what they want from you, and the problems they face, you'll be able to address them better through your content. This will not only lead to better content, but will allow you to build connections with potential customers before they even start the car buying process.

Write Longer, More In-Depth Content

With content, most dealers seem to do the bare minimum. It's almost like they hit 300 words and say "Well, that's good enough," and then move on to the next page. There's no word count limit with content, and you certainly shouldn't think that there is.

In fact, longform content ranks better on average and attracts more links, as well as social engagement when compared to shortform content.

Don't get caught up in thinking that it's the word count itself that makes content great, though. The reason longform content tends to do better is because it attracts more links and better overall user engagement (lower bounce rates and high time on site).

But that doesn't mean that you can just cram 1000 or more words on a page without thinking about the quality and still see success. The content not only has to be relevant to the original topic of the page, but it has to align with the intent of the user.

For example, let's say you want to increase your rankings for bad credit keywords, but don't currently have any targeted content on your site. Here's a quick guide to help you target the right keywords, but how to plan and execute the best content for those keywords:

• Start with the Adwords Keyword Planner - What do you want to start with? Let's go with financing as an example. You want to create a page that really captures your dealership's bad credit service. But in order to create the best content, we need to know what specific keywords people are searching to return bad credit terms. This is where the Adwords Keyword Planner comes in. In the "your product or service" field, type "bad credit car loans [INSERT CITY, METRO, or STATE]." Change your targeting to your city, metro, state, or any area you want to target and click "Get ideas." You want to include the location at the end because many of the unmodified terms will show more generic results. This way you also get an idea of how many people are searching for lenders specifically in your neck of the woods.

• Create a List of High-Volume, Semantic Keywords to Target - Once you start digging through the results, you'll want to put together a list of keywords that are both high volume and semantically similar. This means they're contextually relevant and essentially interchangeable. For example, "bad credit auto loans NH" and "bad credit car loans NH" are so similar that they should display the same exact search results. (They don't, though.)

• Find Longtail Keywords to Integrate - Once you've got a list of high volume keywords, stay in the Keyword Planner and start hunting for longtail keywords. These are typically extremely specific phrases with 4 or more words and lower than average search volume. The reason these are so important is there's generally less competition, making it easier to achieve rankings and a steady stream of extremely targeted traffic. For our example topic, "car dealerships in NH for bad credit" is one of the local terms that stood out in my research. Your local users may word phrases differently, but you'll be able to find plenty of longtail keywords to integrate into your upcoming content.

• Create a List of Questions to Answer - To make sure you're providing the best possible information, it's a good idea to list out questions beforehand that should be easily answered by later reading your content. This way you can be confident that potential customers are informed and ready to make a decision without leaving your site to find more information or think things over.

• Make Sure Your Intent is Consistent - When creating content based around transactions, such as a car purchase, you want to stick with that purpose instead of trying to inform them of every little detail involved. While you still need to be informative, you don't want to switch back and forth from advice to a sales pitch throughout the page. Keep your message consistent!

Experiment and Learn from Failure

While there is a lot of data and science involved in a successful SEO strategy, you're not going to find some magic formula and be able to replicate results over and over again.

This means you'll need to experiment with content for a variety of keyword sets and have multiple strategies ready to test. Give the data time to settle to see what's working and what's clearly not. As I've said many times throughout this series, SEO rarely provides fast results and is not meant to be rushed over, only to be abandoned after a short period of time.

If you really want to maintain steady growth online, you have to commit to SEO, work hard, diversify your efforts, and be patient. These are musts in order to see success!

Have any questions or concerns about getting your dealership's SEO off the ground? Let's talk in the comments below!

Navigating SEO is a DrivingSales.com exclusive series by Timothy Martell, CEO of Wikimotive. In this series, Tim breaks down ways dealers can improve their SEO and offers insight into how it will benefit business.

There's no worse feeling than to see your website on a downward spiral. It may not even be much, but when it's consistently down, something's up.

Now this has likely happened to everyone at one point or another, but it's what you do after noticing the trend that makes the most difference. That's because inaction is the enemy of SEO. You need to understand what's going on, make a plan, and start working to fix your issues as quickly as possible.

In many cases, you may have been hit by a penalty, or have hit a technical snag and need to change website providers. Other times, the issues are not so easily identifiable.

Below, I'll go over a few of the unexpected reasons you're not seeing positive SEO results and solutions to help you change your current situation.

High Ranking Pages are Being Downgraded

Most sites have a select few high ranking pages that deliver a good percentage of the overall organic traffic, including the homepage. From there, the remaining 30-50% of goes to individual pages via longtail keywords, which fluctuant on a month-to-month basis.

So when high ranking pages start to lose traction, it can affect how your organic traffic looks as a whole. This is why it's so important to keep an eye on these high-trafficked pages, as you'll want to take action the second you notice a declining traffic trend.

The problems may not be so obvious, though, especially if you haven't made any changes to the page in recent months. And to be honest, there's no way for anyone to give you a definitive answer to the "why" question you're probably asking yourself.

Instead, all you can do is analyze the data within your analytics and the SERPs in order to come up with an action plan. Here are a few quick ways you can breathe new life into an older page and hopefully regain lost traffic and add even more over time:

• Rewrite or Update the Content - By updating your content with the most up-to-date information, or simply rewriting it to be a better resource, you're improving user experience. On top of this, Google takes notice of changes and may immediately reward your site, depending on how it grades the new updates. Be sure you're going above and beyond to provide valuable information that matches the intent of users searching the target topic.

• Create Related, Supplementary Pages and Internal Links - It's nearly impossible to completely capture an entire subject with content on a single page. And even if you could, it'd be overkill for the intent of most users. Instead, create supplementary pages that relate to your target topic and link it to your original, high-trafficked page. For example, if your original page was about your used car business, you could write a separate page that provides reasons to buy a used car over a new car, linking to that page. You could also create a list of the best used cars to buy, using data from sources like Consumer Reports and U.S. News. Over time, these pages will build authority on their own, and pass some of that along to your main used cars page.

• Redesign the Page to Increase User Interaction - Small issues like low average time on site and high bounce rates could be bringing down your once high-ranking page. Google is implementing more and more user interaction-based factors into its algorithm, so you'll need to make sure your site is not just providing great content but a high-quality experience as well. To help with this, you could redesign the page to include images, video, interactive tools to keep users engaged on-site longer. As a result, you should also see higher conversion rates.

You're Not Focusing on Local

Over the past few years, Google has placed more emphasis on location-based search. These are business results pulled from Google My Business and Google Maps that allow users quick access to relevant information about local businesses, such as location and phone numbers.

While not a completely new feature, more and more keywords are triggering these local pack results each and every day. As of writing this, Google has also recently modified the design of the local pack dramatically. Instead of showing 3-7 results, they've standardized it to only show 3 results, linking to maps results if a user wants to view more.

A lack of local focus in 2015 could cause your overall traffic to dip if your competitors have beat you to the punch. But that doesn't mean all is lost!

To gain traction in local, you need to have four key factors:

• A complete and optimized Google My Business Page.
• Citations (local listings) with consistent NAP across the web.
• Content optimized with locally-focused keywords.
• Consistent flow of quality reviews on Google and across the web.

Your Strategy is Not Consistent

One of the biggest misconceptions with SEO is that it's something that you can just stop and start whenever you feel like it and see results. In some cases, you can do on-off SEO and see results. But to grow your overall organic traffic and improve rankings, there needs to be a consistent strategy in place.

In a lot of cases, if you're not adding new content, updating old content, working on building links and new local citations, you're not going to see consistent growth. If you want that, you need a consistent strategy. This means you can't have a BDC associate working on SEO in their spare time and expect any tangible results.

I've said it before and I'll continue to say it: SEO is a full-time job. Start taking it seriously, and you'll open up opportunities to increase traffic, leads, and sales!

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Navigating SEO is a DrivingSales.com exclusive series by Timothy Martell, CEO of Wikimotive. In this series, Tim breaks down ways that car dealers can improve their SEO and offers insight into how it will benefit business.

One of the problems most dealership websites suffer from is a lack of truly unique content. I don't just mean the words on the page, though. I'm talking about the things that really sell people on your dealership, its service, and your product line.

Unfortunately, most website providers come with cookie-cutter designs, content, and page formatting.  So how do you improve upon that and make your pages stand out to visitors? In this post, I'll show you five ways you can take a page from zero to hero in 30 minutes or less.

Add Images and Video

It sounds like such an obvious answer, but images and video can be crucial components when creating content.

For instance, if you're looking to improve your service department's page, adding a few high-quality images from the shop is a nice way to add a personal touch. A video, with a quick walkthrough of your services, a chat with the service manager, and a few testimonials will not only keep visitors on your site longer, but help sell the department as well.

You don't want to overdo images or video because not every page requires a video or a gallery of images. Experiment with different layouts and see what works and what doesn't for your site's visitors.

Be sure to keep an eye on traffic, time on site, bounce rate, and conversion metrics after you make these changes! (I recommend keeping track of these in a spreadsheet and updating it each month with new data.)

Create More Engaging and Informative Content

I can already hear it: "But what does it mean, Tim?!"

I know, I know. I don't want to be one of those guys who uses buzzwords without any explanation.

Engaging content is the stuff that really gets people interested. It's helpful, entertaining, and informative all at the same time. For example, someone visiting your service department page may be looking for reasons why they should visit your shop over others. Why not tell them and get them interested (maybe even excited) about doing business with you?

Another issue I often see with dealer content is a lack of depth. Don't just list your services in a boring bullet list! You don't have to give them a step-by-step description of your process, but add a little detail about those services and how your dealership's is superior compared to the competition.

Integrate Relevant Keywords

While keywords may not be the end-all, be-all of SEO that they once were, their importance can't be understated. By simply using the Adwords Keyword Planner Tool to identify relevant terms, you can give your content a quick boost that may help it gain the traction it needs to outrank your competition.

Just be sure you're not overdoing it. You want your content to read naturally. This means that if you read it out loud to yourself and you start to sound robotic, you're doing it wrong! (E.g."Our auto repair service is the best in town. Other auto repair shops bow down before our technicians' masterful auto repair work.")

Link to Relevant, Internal Pages

A good internal linking strategy is another small touch that will not only improve user experience, but provide an SEO benefit as well.

Like keywords, though, they should not be over-used. You don't want links popping up every other sentence. Only when a relevant topic comes up, and users would gain from clicking through to learn more, should you link to another page on your site.

Sticking with our service department example, you might have a small section that lists your services. From here, let's assume you have a separate page dedicated to oil change information. If I'm a visitor who's landed on your service department page, that oil change page might interest me, so let me know it exists by linking to it!

Create Call to Action Elements

If there's one thing that car guys know, it's that you can't always leave someone to their own devices to make a decision. If your salespeople aren't approaching buyers on the lot, some may wander in for help, but a lot of them are just going to leave.

It's no different with content. If you don't give users an action to take, they'll probably just bounce. Getting them to stay and take action is actually pretty simple, though.

For a service department page, the natural place to send visitors to next is a service scheduling page. So at the bottom of the page, create a button that says "Schedule Service" and link it to the scheduling page.

Some pages may call for multiple buttons (e.g. new and used car listings),  dedicated lead forms, or custom elements to properly supply users with the right call to action. Have fun and experiment with these to see what works and what doesn't for different types of visitors!

Like what you see? Read last week's post: 5 Things Dealers Need to Understand About SEO

Navigating SEO is a DrivingSales.com exclusive series by Timothy Martell, CEO of Wikimotive. In this series, Tim breaks down ways that car dealers can improve their SEO and offers insight into how it will benefit business.

While SEO can be made to sound complicated, it's acutally a pretty simple practice. In its most basic form, SEO is all about knowing how search engines rank pages and applying that information to your site in order for it to appear more valuable to search engine users. The more valuable your site appears, the more you'll be rewarded with organic traffic.

But how does my site gain value in the eyes of search engines?

The two easiest ways to increase the value provided by your website is to create relevant, high quality content and work on building/earning links.

Content that's relevant, well-researched, and written/formatted shows search engines that you're an authority on any given subject. So if you're a Toyota dealer, you should have tons of content about Toyota the brand, Toyota vehicles, and Toyota services on your website. Don't mistake quantity for quality, though. Four pieces of high quality content can be more valuable than forty pieces of thin, low quality content. (Google hates thin content!)

Links tell search engines how your website connects to others, and is used as a quality signal. If you're linked to by high quality sites, your site will also be seen as high quality. But just like thin content, if you're being linked to by sites with little to no authority, your link building efforts won't provide results.

Now that introductions are out of the way, here's a look at five important things dealers need to understand about SEO:

How SEO Affects Your Dealership

Most of you probably aren't concerned about the ins and outs of SEO, you just want to know how it will affect your dealership, right? Here's how to think about it:

When a prospective car buyer searches "Toyota Corolla Los Angeles," it's pretty clear they're looking to buy a Toyota Corolla in Los Angeles. But if your dealership isn't in the first few results for this type of search, you're simply out of luck. That customer is likely going to find what they're looking for before they even know your dealership exists. Doesn't matter if you have better prices, service, or you give a free iPad away with every car sold. They couldn't find you.

With a proper SEO strategy, you'll be able to better compete for high-value keywords, rank for more unique and longtail keywords, and will receive more leads over time. The reason this is so important is because you're not advertising to [hopefully] reach car buyers. Instead, a regular supply of high-intent car buyers seek you out. You'll still have other methods of pulling in buyers, but you'll be increasing sales by better reaching people that are in the market TODAY.

SEO is a Long-Term Commitment

If your plan is to give SEO a try the same way you'd give Netflix 30 days to entertain you, don't waste your time. SEO requires a long-term commitment in order to take effect and show tangible results. Doing the job right, there's no getting around this.

Not even the most accomplished SEOs can make magic happen. It all comes from a strong strategy, commitment, consistency, and time. I'm sorry if that means you'll never seek out SEO services, but I'd rather give you the truth now than disappoint you later.

That's not to say you can't dabble in SEO and see results, but without commitment and consistency you're cutting out a lot of potential growth.

Some SEO Activity Can Harm Your Website

When you hire an automotive SEO company, or an independent consultant, you expect them to provide results. Due to the nature of SEO, however, there's the possibility your site and business can actually be harmed by those who take short cuts, use black hat techniques, and generally don't follow Google's Webmaster Guidelines.

Things like duplicate content, thin content, and paid links are unfortunately still common practices in 2015, despite Google's intense crackdown via manual spam penalties and algorithm updates. The worst part is that, if you don't know what to look for, you're not going to be able to hold SEO vendors accountable.

Improving User Experience is a Fundamental Part of SEO

A lot of dealers are shocked to learn how important their website and its user experience are to their success with SEO. It's not something that just works all the time, every time, regardless of how your website looks and functions. User experience and SEO are inter-connected.

This is because user behavior affects SEO. (I touched on this in last week's post, but it needs to be mentioned again here.)

If users are spending less time on your site and viewing less pages per session compared to your competition, it's logical to conclude that they're providing users with a better experience. As a result, your competition will also likely out rank you. When you work on improving the user experience of your website, you're not only able to see better results from the traffic you are getting, you're sending signals to search engines that will help increase your organic traffic over time.

You Get What You Pay For, So Treat SEO Like a Full-Time Job

We're in the car business, so we should know better than anyone else that the saying, "You get what you pay for," is almost always true. If a customer comes in and is looking to really pinch pennies on a used car, they know that $1,500 doesn't buy them a quality car.

So why would you as a dealer think that a company could offer quality service for the equivalent of beater-car prices?

If you want a hands-on, custom experience that actually gets results, you need to treat SEO like a full-time job. Whether you hire someone in-house or outsource to a vendor, you need to know exactly what you're getting and why it's worth it.

I believe this information will become more relevant and important as time goes on. Eventually, digital marketing will eclipse traditional marketing and every single dealership in the country will be giving SEO a closer look. As of today, I view SEO as a chance for dealers to hit the ground running and put themselves in a prime position of power for the foreseeable future. 

Navigating SEO is a DrivingSales.com exclusive series by Timothy Martell, CEO of Wikimotive. In this series, Tim breaks down ways dealers can improve their SEO and offers insight into how it will benefit business.

You're probably confused as to why a guy who runs an automotive SEO company would be out to make a case for SEO to come last in the content creation process. But before you get your torches and pitchforks, hear me out!

Below, I'll detail of few of the techniques you can use to create great content without being overwhelmed by SEO:

Search Engines Crawl, Visitors Actually Read Content

The whole point of SEO is to attract visitors from search engines to your website, typically for the benefit of business. But when you're creating content for SEO, where does that leave the user?

Are you even thinking about how they'll use and react to your content before you publish, or are you more focused on going through an "SEO checklist" aimed at creating the most optimized pages possible?

Take a look at any "optimized" content page on your site and put yourself in the position of a visitor. Ask yourself these three questions:

• How would I interact with this page as a user? (Submit information, navigate to related pages, etc.)
• What information am I meant to receive from this page? (Intent)
• What's the end goal for this page? (Purely informative, lead driver, or both.)

When you stop thinking about SEO and start thinking about users, you're able to discover ways in which you can improve your content. These improvements to the overall user experience will also indirectly benefit your site's SEO.

The reason?

User Behavior Affects Search Rankings

As Google and other search engines become more sophisticated over time, they're less likely to rely on signals, such as keywords, which can be easily manipulated. Instead, search engines are relying more and more on data from users to shape the SERPs of tomorrow.

These results are based on a few core metrics:

• CTR (click-through rate)
• Bounce Rate (percentage of users who view only one page)
• Time on Page/Site (time spent browsing a page/site after clicking through a search result)

But why are these metrics so important? For one, they're all a signal of quality that can't be easily manipulated by outside forces.

A site with a high click-through rate is clearly presenting information that aligns with the user's intent. What this means is, a user searching "2016 Chevy Cruze Specs" is more likely to click on a result that uses that specific phrase in the title, description, or URL, than one that just says "Chevy Cruze Info."

If you happen to click on that "Chevy Cruze Info" result thinking it's sure to provide you with specs for the 2016 model, what do you do? Instinctively, I'm sure you'd click the back button and try another result. That's counted as a bounce, as you did not view more than one page before exiting the site. This tells Google that it is very unlikely that you were provided with the information you were looking for, and that is likely to affect the ranking of that page.

Another metric Google takes into consideration is "time on site." This represents the amount of time a user spends on a site after clicking through from a search results page. When comparing multiple results, users are likely getting better quality information from a page where the average time on site is 3 minutes, compared to one where the time on site is less than 30 seconds, right?

When creating content, it's a good idea to create custom metadata for each page in order to properly represent your content in search results, create ways for users to easily navigate to other related pages, and create content that engages users so they stay on your site longer than your competitors.

SEO Has Evolved: Valuable Content Ranks Over Optimized Content

It's been nearly 20 years since Google was first conceptualized as a Stanford University research project for students Larry Page and Sergey Brin. It was the first search engine to use links as a relevancy and quality signal to rank pages in search results.

At the time, most search engines relied solely on keyword density. But Page and Brin's idea wanted to dig into the way websites were connected, in order to present better results to users. This was the beginning of advanced search algorithms.

Since that time, there have been hundreds of updates to Google's search algorithm and a countless number of other factors added to the mix. Recently, one of the most important changes was made with the "Hummingbird" update, which allowed the search engine to better understand intent when providing results.

What this means is, results for queries such as "buy a used car" and "buying a used car" turn up two types of results based on the implied intent. When you search "buy a used car," you're likely looking for results that will get you listings of used cars in your area. "Buying a used car," on the other hand, implies you want information about buying a used car, including advice.

Because of this intent-driven search update, it's important to only create content that's valuable when matched with the related intent.

For example, if I want to rank for "2015 Cruze vs. 2016 Cruze," I should provide a detailed breakdown of what separates the new 2016 Cruze from the outgoing 2015 model. This would include exterior and interior design changes, mechanical changes, upgrades, pricing changes, and more.

Someone searching this type of query is likely considering the 2015 Cruze, but is wondering if it's worth waiting on the 2016 model . You should also play both sides, giving the reader reasons why they should wait, and reasons why they should buy now.

Not Thinking About SEO is the New SEO…Sort Of

It sounds ridiculous, but it's true. Most of the advice you'll hear from influential SEOs is how people need to be more genuine with their SEO efforts. While true, you can still optimize for keywords, add engaging metadata, link out to relevant resources, link internally to related content, and utilize an on-page SEO checklist without falling into the pit of "overdoing" SEO.

Modern SEO is all about balance, and that's the one thing you absolutely need to keep in mind when creating content, building links, and optimizing your pages.