SEO and marketing for car dealerships

Vehicle detail pages come and go as cars sell, most of them carry the same manufacturer description, and filtered search result pages can multiply into thousands of URLs that compete with each other. Search engines spend their time on those pages and pass over the ones that should rank, such as a model page or the service department.

Alan Morgan Group starts with a crawl of the site as Google sees it, then works through what the platform lets you change: titles, page templates, which filtered pages get indexed, structured data and redirects. Where the vendor blocks a change that matters, we write down exactly what it blocks so you can take it to your rep.

Pages that stay put while inventory changes. A strong page for each model you sell, written for your market rather than copied from the manufacturer, catches searches like a specific model and trim near a city. Comparison pages answer the questions shoppers ask before they visit. A finance page and a trade-in page meet buyers who are earlier in the decision.

Service is the other half. People search for an oil change, brake work or a recall repair for their make far more often than they shop for a car, and the service department is where a dealership keeps a customer for years.

Google lets a dealership list sales, service and parts as separate departments, each with its own hours and phone number. Doing that keeps a service customer from calling the sales line at 7am and lets each department collect its own reviews. Alan Morgan Group sets up the departments, keeps hours current through holidays, and routes review requests to the department that did the work.

The structure is the same, with more weight on seasonality and on parts and accessories. Riders search heavily in spring for new models and in winter for parts and service. Alan Morgan Group plans content and ad budgets around those seasons rather than spreading spend evenly across the year.

Alan Morgan Group's published automotive results come from an aftermarket truck accessories retailer, a business with the same inventory, fitment and two-location map problems a dealership has. The case study shows the method and the month-by-month results. In a working session we can walk through what applies to your store.

Read the case study: Organic growth for an aftermarket automotive retailer →