Car dealers and Internet Sales Managers are looking for ways to increase their Internet visibility without spending money.

I’m often asked by car dealers what they can do themselves to save on Internet marketing costs. I always try to find ways in which their staff can be a part of the success.

I have outlined one project that everyone who is reading this can implement. Automotive SEO does not have to be the sole responsibility of any outside consultant.

Check Your Page Titles

Just this week I was on the phone with a dealer group reviewing their six websites.  I showed them that many of the primary website pages (see below) had the dealer name starting in the HTML title tag. Their domain was an exact match for their dealership name so this was something that should be fixed.

Hypothetical Example: Your website is located at bmwpeabody.com and on every primary page you started the title text with BMW Peabody.

It is my experience that if your domain name is an exact match for your dealership name, you do not need to have it on every HTML page title.  In fact, this will hurt your Automotive SEO strategy because the TITLE tag is an important part of Google and Yahoo’s indexing algorithm.  If you have any questions about this, read the Google SEO Starter Guide.

Fixing Page Titles

Correcting website page titles is something that an Internet Sales Manager or IT staff member can edit on their own and make an immediate impact on their search visibility.

Anyone reading this article should do a quick check to see that your page titles are in compliance. The basic “commandment” is: page titles should be descriptive of the page and they should not be a duplicate of another page.

Check your page titles by typing into Google this command:  site:www.xxxxxxx.com

Replace the xxxxxxx with your domain name.

Primary Pages for Optimization

Many dealer website platforms give you the ability to edit META tags on all pages except inventory detail pages.  Check with your website provider to see how you can update the META Titles and META descriptions on each key page.

For many automotive websites, their are about 20 primary web pages.  These pages would include:

• New Cars Specials
• Used Car Specials
• Service Coupons
• Parts Coupons
• Service Appointments
• Order Parts
• About Us
• Contact Us
• Directions
• Price Quote
• Financing

If someone follows this outline, your page titles can be updated in as little as one hour once you do your research.  It takes some tweaking and testing but it is better to try and fix your titles than to leave them sloppy or duplicated.

Page Title Guidance

Any time an SEO consultant suggest a strategy there is a risk for criticism that someone has a better strategy so review what I have to say and check with out credible sources.  Also see how your competition is titling their main pages to get soem ideas.

In this example, let’s take a Chrevrolet dealer located in my old home town of North Plainfield, New Jersey.  If you were a Chevy dealer in North Plainfield, you might write page titles follows (in red):

Service Page -“Chevy Service Repair Center North Plainfield – Chevrolet Dealer Somerset County NJ“

Used Car Specials – “NJ Chevy Used Car Dealer – Preowned Chevrolet Cars North Plainfield“

About Us Page – “Somerset County Chevy Car Dealer – North Plainfield NJ“

The idea is that you should not start the page titles with “Brian Chevy“ if your website is at www.brianchevy.com and your page titles should be focused statements, without fluff words, that are keyword rich.

Do not create page titles like this “Brian Chevy is the Best Chevy Service Center in the North Plainfield area”.  This is to say don’t make the HTML title a sentence but rather a condensed statement about the page with keywords in mind.

I hope this is helpful to anyone who wants to do some search engine optimization internally.  If you have any further questions, you can drop me a line at: 732-450-8200.

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Tags: automotive seo, automotive webinar, automotove seo tips, seo page titles, seo tips