Automotive dealerships are a lifeline for local economies everywhere and put together, they make up an important fixture in the modern economic landscape. Cars are all but essential to operate in today’s world, but that shouldn’t be a reason to grow complacent. There are some big competitors in this space, and if you want to survive during times of economic uncertainty, you cannot afford to let up. That’s not even mentioning how uniquely important marketing is for automotive dealerships as an industry.
There’s a reason that ads for automobiles are so pervasive: cars are a big purchase for most. People do lots of research for purchases like these, so putting your best foot forward to as many people as you can is a must. Normally, this is done through traditional ads, with television being the most popular in this industry. In this article, we’ll be discussing another method to enhance your automotive dealership’s perceived credibility that you might not have heard about: blogging. For an investment as important as buying a new car, people want to know if you are trustworthy and credible, and blogging helps with both. This is only the start of its benefits, as you’ll soon find out.
Table of Contents
Business Blogging and Building a Website
First things first, to reap the benefits of blogging, you need to get yourself a website. Small businesses around the country have one, are getting one, or want one, and there’s no better place to host your blog than your own website. Personal websites are also useful for a number of reasons, online visibility being chief among them. Given how many people look up a business online before making a purchase from them, you can’t afford to not have a website.
With that out of the way, we can start clearing a few things up. To start, what exactly is business blogging? Blogging is the practice of writing and then archiving blog entries on your website.
These entries are written by yourself, your staff, or someone else on behalf of your business. Digital marketing firms, such as SEO Design Chicago, are companies that you can hire to do this for you. The main purpose of blogging is first to bring in new customers on its own, and second to interact with your potential customers.
The beauty of blogging is that you can write about anything you wish, although you’ll probably want to stay on topics related to your business. The most common way to orient a blog entry is to answer a question of some kind. This includes general questions, which concern your industry, services, and products more broadly, and more specific ones pertaining to your business. Your blogs should try to answer both types of questions, for reasons we’ll discuss later.
Why Should Automotive Dealerships Blog?
Is blogging really that important? You might be wondering this question at this point. The answer, of course, is yes! For starters, blogs are an excellent way to get new customers. There are several ways it does this, which are discussed in later sections. Another benefit is the personability it brings to your online image. Blogs excel in the areas of consumer intimacy and connection, areas where traditional advertisements typically fail. Research demonstrates that blogging is extremely cost-effective when it comes to getting new leads.
Online Visibility
Blogs improve your online visibility, there’s no doubt about that. With each new blog entry, there’s a new page for people to discover online. This makes it much easier for those actively looking for you to find you. It is the potential for accidental discoveries, however, where blogs truly show their worth. Most people, when set on buying a car, are initially more interested in researching various cars than dealerships. If you have a lot of relevant blog entries, such as reviews for popular models, it’s inevitable that people will find your website. Blogging is a marketing tool in and of itself when this happens.
Consumer Intimacy
As mentioned earlier, automotive dealership blogs hold a special appeal because of how much closer they can feel to interested consumers. There is so much more you can put into a blog post than what you could in a traditional advertisement, and you can do it at basically no cost. It’s best to keep your blog entries below 3000 words apiece, so you don’t bore the consumer, but that limit is more than enough to get your message out.
Starting a blog post with a question and then answering the question is a great way to make a new post. You can’t go wrong with posts that deal with general, or “evergreen,” questions. Due to how popular these questions tend to be, you’re quite likely to garner a significant amount of traffic with these posts. They also compound in value over time. Since people are always asking this question, it makes people finding you through that post easier and easier over time.
That being said, you shouldn’t forget to answer specific questions as well. Answering these questions goes a long way in improving your image, as they demonstrate experience. If you’re inclined to do so, you can use your automotive dealership blog as a means to answer consumer questions directly. Not only is this a great way to entice said consumers into purchasing from you, but it also helps draw in people who like to see you responding to people’s concerns.
How Blogs Affect SEO
Blogging is intrinsically connected to another criminally underused digital marketing strategy: search engine optimization (SEO). SEO, although it sounds complicated, isn’t difficult to grasp at all. It simply describes efforts taken on a website to make search engines, such as Google, see it more easily. The first goal of SEO is to get your website to appear where it’s wanted, namely when someone enters search terms related to you. Ideally, though, you want your website to be at the very top of the organic search results. When you consider how many people only bother investigating the first links they are shown by Google, SEO becomes a much more alluring strategy.
SEO, put simply, starts and ends with how your website is constructed. You need to pay careful attention to the website’s metadata, or contents, and how to format them. The metadata of your website is how Google knows which search terms apply to you. The more connected you are to the entered search query, the higher you appear among the organic results.
Blog Keywords
Your goal with SEO is to increase your website’s relevance to the search terms of your industry. To do so effectively requires some study on how Google’s search algorithm works, but we can summarize here. The first thing you’ll want to do is find your keywords. Keywords are whatever someone might enter into the search bar to find you or a related business, examples including:
- Automotive dealership near me (or in a particular place, such as Denver)
- Premier auto sales
- Car dealership
- Car salesman
- New car sales
- Used car dealership
The above are some examples, which can be a jumping-off point for you to find more applicable ones. Checking what keywords your competitors use is another great way to find keywords of your own. If that isn’t an option, you can always fall back on Google Ads Keyword Planner, which generates plenty of useful keywords for free. After you know what keywords you want to use, you need to sprinkle them throughout your website, using them as much as you reasonably can. What better way to get your usage of keywords up than through blogs? Engineering your blog entries to help with SEO is a fantastic way to improve the traffic headed to your page, which will assuredly generate some leads.
Link Building
Another way you can make the most of each blog entry is to use plenty of links. Although it may not seem obvious, links are an important metric that Google uses for measuring a site’s credibility. The more links you use, the more Google will push you to the top. This is because link-filled websites are almost essentially more well-researched and grounded than their linkless counterparts. Your website’s visitors will think this as well, so don’t forget this! Once you have a big enough library of blog entries you can also connect your blog posts to one another through links. This is great for turning the traffic success of one page into multi-page traffic for your whole website!
SEO Design Chicago Can Help Automotive Dealerships
SEO Design Chicago is here to help with your automotive dealership blog and digital marketing needs. If it’s a service related to digital marketing, we either provide it or have written extensively about it. For blog writing in particular, we have specialized teams of writers who can provide excellent content for you to use on your dealership’s website. If you’re looking for a company to show you what digital marketing can do, you’ve come to the right place.
FAQ:
- What is SEO?
- How long should blog posts be?
- Do small businesses really need a website?
- How does a blog improve visibility?
- How do I find keywords for my blog?
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