We all know SEO is important. From choosing effective keywords to optimizing our Google rankings, we know it takes additional effort to get our businesses seen. And one particularly useful tool in the SEO arsenal is geotagging.
Geotagging is a practice that’s been around for a few years, and for good reason: it’s a great tactic to use if you want to massively increase your online exposure (to customers within reach of your dealership). It’ll help you rank your website at the top of search engines with what seems like minimal effort. Geotagging your content and images will help get your pages seen by more people and help you to achieve more inbound links.
So what exactly is geotagging?
It’s the process of embedding geographic coordinates within pages, images, and other media on your website. ‘Geo’ means a single point or a single location, which for car dealers usually means the city that your dealership is in—for example, Waynesboro, GA. Wherever you are on Earth, there’s a specific geo-location coordinate for you. Geotagging defines the specific point of where your dealership is.
The ‘tag’ part of ‘geotagging’ means that you put the geographic location (example: Waynesboro, GA) on the image or in the content itself. This tag allows search engines to classify your content in the designated location. When you geotag content, you’re giving Google specific and reliable information of where, precisely, your dealership is located. Google looks at the consistency of your dealership name, address, and phone number across the listings on the web. There is major value in geotagging content and images within your website because doing so gives power to the relevancy of the location of your dealership.
Think about it—if someone in the area is looking for a vehicle, they’ll most likely search something like “Toyota Prius in Waynesboro, GA.” Because you’ve geotagged your content with ‘Waynesboro, GA,’ your Prius pages that have been designated with this tag should pop right up. That’s why it’s important to put geotags in the titles of your pages, in your content’s metadata, and within the titles and the description of the images on the pages themselves.
Customers search “Toyota Prius in Waynesboro, GA” because they want to know if there are other Toyota dealerships in the city that they might not know about, as well as comparison shop. They want to look at all their options; but because they used a geotag—Waynesboro, GA—they mainly want to find a dealership that is close to them. And lucky for you, since you used geotags in your pages, you’ll be able to be easily found by them!
The practice of geotagging is 100% white hat—there’s no manipulation or funny business with using geotagged content to help rank your website at the top of Google. So tag away!