The Importance of SEO Within the Motor Industry

                         

SEO is a buzzword you may have heard by now, but might not quite understand exactly what it's all about. So, let's break it down....

What is SEO?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation. SEO is the process of improving your website to get traffic from free (also called organic or natural) search results in search engines like Google, Bing or Yahoo. 

Webfx carried out a study in 2021 and found 75% of search engine users do not go beyond the first page of search results. This shows the importance of optimizing your website so it is ranked as high as possible in search results.

While a company can pay a fee to advertise their site and appear higher on search engines, SEO is all about improving the organic results as we mentioned.

How do we improve our SEO?

The first step in implementing SEO best practices is creating an effective website that is easy to navigate, communicates information clearly and provides a great user experience.

There's also much more you can do, take a look at our main tips below:

• Optimize your page speed - nothing makes a user click that 'X' button faster than a page that is slow to load! Some simple ways to ensure that your site loads quickly include optimizing image sizes, not using too much media or features and sticking to one or two key fonts throughout. 

• Create internal links -  Links play an important role when it comes to SEO. When one page links to another it helps Google make connections between pages and their content. This can help with the categorization of pages, and perhaps more importantly enables Google to add them to the list of sites they consider when displaying search results more efficiently. And linking does not only have to be to external sites, you can also link between pages within your own website to show Google all pages on your site are important. It also helps the user experience as linking within your own site will make it easier for users to find what they are looking for. And it can also help increase traffic to pages that are less-visited!

• Ensure your website is mobile-friendly - More than 50% of all traffic comes from mobile devices, so making sure your site is mobile friendly is key. Google often crawls the mobile version of your site in order to determine how it should rank amongst its results overall, so it is key that is adaptable and efficient when accessed on a mobile device.

• Use Google Analytics - constantly tracking and monitoring how users are interacting with your website is key so you can track how your site is performing and make any adjustments necessary in order to improve the SEO of your site. If you missed our last blogpost on Google Analytics you can catch up here.

Why is it important in the Motor Industry?

In reality, SEO is important to every industry. However, take for example the candle industry. There will be a certain percentage of people that want to buy candles - but they are a want, not a need and they are not popular with every demographic. There are also a limited number of candle makers and sellers. Take a look below at the number of results that come up for the search result 'buy candle Ireland'.

Now, think of the Motor Industry, where there are more than 1.5 billion cars in the world owned by almost every demographic of people and cars and car maintenance are often essential for people particularly in the Western World including where we are based within Ireland. This means there is a lot of competition when it comes to selling cars and selling car maintenance services. And the more competition, the more results you must compete with. So, the higher your company can show up in search engine results, the more likely you are to secure business from more users.

Now, take a look below at the number of results that come up for the search result 'buy car Ireland' which far surpasses the number of results for candles!

But, don't just take our word for how important SEO is. Check out our friend The Marketing Bite's blog on the importance of SEO within the food industry for another great take on this topic. Click here to read.

Holly - Market Motoring