As we round out another year full of search engine updates and new ideas for best practices, it is a great time to confirm your website is optimized for search. As we race to keep up with trends and create content that follows the latest guidelines, we may easily miss a multitude of onsite opportunities to elevate our organic search performance strategies.
Back to the Basics
How often are you checking your website for areas of opportunity? How are you determining where an opportunity is? From linking to CTAs to content to Metadata, optimizing the foundational pieces of your pages for search is vital.
Search engines may struggle to crawl and determine intent for pages with iframes or forms, meaning these may need additional attention to appear for the necessary keywords. Enter short and valuable content— when creating content for inventory pages, finance applications, service schedulers, etc., be mindful of keyword stuffing, but get to the point. Find the three or four most important keywords for those pages and create brief content to convey your message. Adding content below these forms allows users to see the important part of the page while providing a given page’s purpose to search engines.
Page metadata is another opportunity to inform search engines about your page’s content. When done properly, the metadata will appear clearly in search results, informing the user of what the page is about. However, if you break character limits, search engines can add their own or cut off what you originally put. In other words, implementing effective metadata for each page should be considered an additional foundation for a good, supplemental strategy.
Example of how to properly optimize on-site page metadata. Title tag and meta description follow character count, use of specific and relevant keywords, and call to action.
Solidifying Page Intent with Unseen Optimizations
What about the optimizations we can’t see? Embedding multimedia on a page presents an array of opportunities to further keyword strategy and page intention. Adding relevant images not only enhances user experience but also gives another opportunity to meaningfully build in keywords. Image alt tags are text that should be attached to an image, appearing when the image doesn’t load or if a user uses page crawlers to find out what’s there. When done correctly, image alt tags are another way to strengthen the page keyword strategy
YouTube is a great tool to elevate your organic search presence, and dealer-created videos can be used to bolster blogs and brand awareness pages. If you want to create a “What’s New In The X” page to highlight new inventory coming onto the lot, why not show users through a video? These can easily be incorporated by embedding them onto the page as supplemental optimized content. But how do we let search engines know why that video is there? By adding video schema: data code embedded onto the page to assist search engines’ understanding of the video. Now, search engines can crawl for the keywords in content, links, headers, and multimedia, further solidifying the intent behind your pages!
Elevating Page Experience
Do a quick search of custom pages on your website. How many of these use “For Sale” or “Deals Near Me” in the title? Creating evergreen model-specific pages is a great way to emphasize your website’s authority on these queries. From local “For Sale” pages to “Deals and Offers,” these pages not only highlight your dealership and inventory but they present a unique opportunity to elevate the user experience. If a user is searching “Model For Sale In My City” why not give them a page that has all of the information in one click? This is where page builders come into play!
From adding widgets to short code, you can embed specific inventory right onto the page. By doing so, we have a page not only optimized for search, but gives users the ability to see available vehicles as they scroll the page. On paper, this creates an opportunity for higher engagement times and elevated active users while further allowing them to click into sales forms or contact buttons without having to navigate through multiple website pages.
Elevate Your Organic Search Performance
The truth is, your website is an ongoing project. As new updates come out and new features are made available, there will be pages that require optimization after optimization. Taking advantage of every opportunity to elevate the page strategy ensures your website stays competitive. While we may never have the secret code to crack how to put every page in the #1 spot in search, these tools can support your ongoing website foundation maintenance efforts to build a strong foundation for your website.
