If you’ve hired an internet marketing agency for car dealerships or other businesses, then you’ll probably get an earful about the best way to run an optimization campaign. However, even so-called experts can’t always agree about the finer points of campaign strategy. Ultimately, if their techniques are white hat and they’re boosting your sales, then you shouldn’t be that concerned with it. We thought it would be helpful, though, to talk about some of the recognized SEO techniques that are proven to work in the long run.
The first thing that you’ll want to do is to identify any crawlability issues that your site is having and deal with them. If your website can’t be crawled, then it can’t be indexed. Look for indecipherable navigation, badly-formatted link architecture, and check your Meta Robots tag to make sure that everything is functioning as it should be.
Next, do your keyword research. Look at the products and services you’re offering, and look at what your customers are most likely to be searching for. You should overhaul your keyword research often. Industry changes will mean different search terms will become more and less popular.
After that, do your on-site SEO. This encompasses making sure your page titles are impacting search rankings, utilizing link title tags, seeing that your website architecture is fundamentally sound, and making sure that you have quality HTML content. These are all things that you should be checking up on regularly anyway, but in any self-respecting optimization campaign, you have to double check that all of these aspects are working as they should be.
You should then look at content expansion. If you don’t have a blog where you’re posting regularly, now would be the time to get one up and running. Any visual content relevant to your products or company would also be welcome. Videos and pictures always help you rank.
Finally, you’ll want to do your off-site SEO. That includes such things as acquiring inbound links to your website and trying to build and maintain your social media presence. Facebook and Twitter are a must, but also look to LinkedIn, Google Plus, and Pinterest. Think about your target audience. Where are your potential customers likely to be spending time?
There’s so much more that you can do, but that should be plenty to get you started. If you’re discussing an SEO campaign with your marketing director or an internet marketing agency you hired, you should see some form of all of these things. If you’re not, you need to consider getting somebody on the job that won’t neglect the basics.
