During the present novel coronavirus pandemic that has caused the economy to come to a standstill and consequently a drastic drop in automobile sales, positioning of the dealer's website on search-engine search results becomes paramount.
When it comes to vehicle sales, dealers in the shadow of their parent brand are all looking for solutions that would allow them to surpass the latter or even attract traffic from potential buyers who are still searching for information. At this stage of the search, this is what we refer to as informational requests.
Just to reiterate, SEO or Search Engine Optimization is the discipline that allows a website’s SEO consultant to grow its organic traffic. It relies on various levers including the structure of the site, the content naturally, and its reach, whether through social media or inbound links (also called backlinks).
We’ll detail below the main elements to take into account for each lever mentioned.
Structure of the site and its state of health
The structure of the site includes the tree structure (information architecture), navigation within this information, and the internal mesh between pages. Roughly speaking, we’re talking about the design of the site, which must be based on three basic principles:
1. Hierarchy: It is understood that the most important elements of a site must be accessible in one step and that they not be drowned in the structure below pages of lesser interest to users and search engines alike.
2. Accessibility: the second- and third-level pages must be easily accessible either via the navigation menu or via the page submenus with a maximum of 3 clicks to reach the desired page. This is called structure flattening.
3. Interconnection: essentially, this refers to redirections to the most relevant page via your internal content in order to help the visitor in his consumption of information on your site. Think of Wikipedia with all its internal links that allow you to learn more about a subject.
Content is king and it must be so for you
If the basis of your content remains of course an indexable site and in good condition for engines such as Google, which gives you an overview of errors and crawl status via the Search Console, the content presented in this way to users and engines will determine whether you position yourself at the top of search results - or not!
Each bit of content in text, image or video format should be relevant to the user and answer all their questions about the search they’ve entered. To do this, of course, it will be necessary to match the content with the keywords used by searchers and optimize copy for them according to the SEO standards we have now. But for sure this is not enough, because even though you probably have an excellent communicator, you also have to show Google full transparency as to your site’s influence on the web and the authority this page will acquire over time via backlinks.
Importance in SEO of Backlinks from sites with strong DA
Link Building is the most difficult and delicate part of the SEO process for two reasons: first, it’s not easy to get incoming links in Dofollow; and second, these links must appear natural to Google.
As for getting backlinks, it all depends on your ingenuity: you can for example start a contest and get links from all the contest-member sites with a semantic-rich mention for your sector; this will help you, as long as they have DA (Domain Authority) that makes sense. If it's a small blog that just started with an AD of 20 or less your efforts will be in vain!
This brings us to the notion of DA. This is simply a score between 0 and 100 that is given to a site by Moz according to its "strength". The more the site accumulates strong domain backlinks (high AD) the higher the AD score it will have. Think of Google with a 93, Facebook 96, Auto123.com is rated 68, but in the realm of automotive sites it's one of the highest scores given by Moz!
Originally, this index was created to replace Google's famous PageRank (PR) that we used to see in our browser's extension bar with a green indicator, at least until the end of 2012. Since then, Google has preferred to hide this score, which was its own internal ranking and which could demonstrate the real authority of websites. In its absence, the SEO community “agreed” to replace it with Moz's DA, and it seems to be working well so far.
So, to make your link look natural and get a high-DA site linking to you, you can turn to high-DA blogs that, thanks to their editorial content, can slip a text anchor that will look natural to the eyes of the engines. But they still need to have a good DA.
It has been shown on Moz's blog that a backlink usually takes between 1 and 3 months to have an effect on the rankings. But the same study also specifies that if the DA is strong (higher than 25 in the graph below and close to 50), the effect is faster, as you can see changes in as little as two months; even more importantly, the change in ranking is much more important:
Conclusion
SEO is a pillar of the marketing strategy - there’s really no doubt about that. All studies conducted in the context of the impact of inbound marketing versus outbound marketing show the latter as more effective, in all aspects (cost, efficiency and of course ROI).
And in SEO, we know that the portfolio of inbound links is the main factor considered by search engines to rank results, in addition to the content of course. So we must give each link the interest it deserves to make a difference. To do this well, look for editorial pieces related to your field of activity and opt for a DA of 60 or above, because those sites will have a greater and faster impact.
