Humans prefer to keep things simple in most circumstances. There are exceptions, some of which include politics, religion, and automotive search engine optimization. Somehow, the last on the list has made it into the consciousness of both vendors and dealers as being much more complicated than it really is.
To stay with the premise behind the article, I’m going to break it all down very quickly and simply. It would be easy to write multiple blog posts about each component, but we want to lay it out in its simplest terms so that readers can discern when others try to complicate things.
- Content – This is the easiest one that pretty much everybody gets, though few do properly. You need high-quality content on your website. You don’t need bulk content, boilerplate content, or scraped content. You need the good stuff. One final note: there’s no such thing as SEO content anymore. There’s simply content. If it’s written specifically for SEO, the provider isn’t doing it right and they should go back to 2012.
- Signals – Most have heard of it. Most avoid it altogether. Some avoid it because they heard that the Google Penguin update killed it, but that is exactly the opposite of the truth. Google Penguin redefined it. The update was designed to prevent link scams from distorting their understanding of inbound links. They did not kill off the necessity for off-site signals like links and social interactions.
- Technical – This is the part that some SEOs put a ton of emphasis on. The reason they do isn’t that it’s really that important. Most dealer websites are a mess when it comes to Schema.org and other technical aspects of their website. No, the real reason they focus on it is that it can’t be double-checked and few dealers have the time to learn how to do it themselves. They can do the rest on their own, but this is the part that justifies the SEO expense. Unfortunately for those who have fallen for the concept, it does little to actually improve rankings.
That’s it. There’s not much to it. When people try to layer it in ways that make it difficult to understand, they’re probably trying to sell you something.
