It’s time to take the mystery out of the technology that drives customers to your website.

Are you casting the largest digital net possible? You should be, and here’s why there are so many resources dedicated to this avenue.

The visitors in this group are in the buying funnel and ripe to be engaged within their online environment!

This traffic is funnelled through the main three search engines (Google, Bing and Yahoo), and also exists through other social media. It’s what’s called Search Engine Optimization, or “SEO.” That’s defined by Wikipedia as the process of affecting the visibility of a Website or Web page in a Web search engine’s unpaid result, often referred to as natural, organic, or earned results.

With proper optimization, SEO is what drives most traffic to your website, which is why it’s often the focus of many online marketers and business owners. Plus, organic traffic has the highest tendency to convert, either through a Call to Action (CTA) or a Quick Link (eg. call now, directions). If you do it right, you can not only conquest your own virtual space but also pull from competing online businesses.

Build a good foundation

How can you approach SEO to pull all these visitors to your website so that they can interact with your staff and ultimately come into your showroom? Start with “building a good foundation.” In the SEO world, it’s important to create a business profile in those portals that influence the search engines so that they find your web presence influential. Those are, in no particular order, Profiles, Listings and Citations.

Our first step is to define your name, address, and phone number (NAP) and create a bio of your business that includes photos, a logo, biography, URL, contact email and your hours of operation. That’s the basis of creating and utilizing the three search engines we listed above.

Profiles

These are the main online profilesrepresenting your business. In the environment of social media, you should create and take control of all of your social media profiles in existence. Use the Outline you created previously to complete your profiles. In most cases, you will be requested for an email address to confirm the profile, which will also need to correspond to your business name. This verification process can vary depending on what portal you are trying to create or modify, and can consist of approvals being through email, automated phone call, mailed postcard or photo proof.

Your most helpful resource is the support section of that given social medium or online profile. You’ll find these in a video or text format, which provides instructions and contact info on how to optimize your profile. If these don’t provide the right guidance, there is always YouTube or blog sites where others that have had these similar problems. You may also find moderators who are experts in the field, who have posted resolutions to questions—you can find them by doing a quick online search.

Ultimately, by having your business posted on the various Profiles, your business can “piggyback” off the strength of that given social medium or search engine, which will give your various business URLs more referral strength, allowing for more searches to be pushed towards your URL and ultimately giving you an opportunity to engage with potential customers.

Citations

Citations are defined as mentions of your business NAP (Name, Address and Phone Number) on other webpages. This can occur through associated websites or local online directories.

Citations are a key component of the ranking algorithms in the search engines, where a business with a greater number of citations will most likely rank higher than a business with fewer citations.

The power of the citation is based on how well established and indexed the portal is, which will indirectly affect your ranking based on that relationship.

To maximize citations, you’ll want to create those business listings each and every month, as well as ensure that you are targeting websites that are automotive, governmental, geo-targeted, media websites and ethnic listings. In addition, technologies likedealeradar.com allow more insight and better reporting of all your profile and citations.

Listings

Listings are very influential with the search engines, since they are based on the relationship with your Website and listing sites with a data shared, either through inventory feeds, review score/comments or e-commence parts syndication.

Data from your Website is extracted and posted onto a portal that pulls other data for consumer review. A few examples of where this is beneficial are inventory websites that pull your inventory (eg. new/used) and categorize and present it within that secondary website.

Best conversion

Start concentrating your SEO presence within these three categories to build a good foundation. This will not only ensure that your website is found based on your search terms, but also have other Websites promote your business through their online presence and how your business is categorized within their portal.

A consistent focus on improving the three categories listed above results in a long-term and perpetual increase in organic ranking, which ultimately creates a more qualified lead and allows for the best conversion to an appointment.