In recent years, the automotive industry has become increasingly competitive within the MENA region, especially in GCC, where people started to search more online with the aid of several websites to buy or sell their cars.

If you’re within the automotive space, this article will help you get the most from your SEO campaign for your automotive website:

1. Write content for your car brands, models, services, and parts:

Based on Google consumer reports, 95% of car sales today begins online*. Therefore, it’s crucial to have a static page for your new and used cars that you sell on the website, and adding a small description will help you to rank for the car brands and model keywords, thus helping you to increase your organic visibility and traffic.

Having an automotive brand website doesn’t mean you can only sell cars; the after-sale part is significant too. According to Google consumer insights, 25% of all automotive-related searches are about parts, services, and maintenance*, as most automotive businesses offer car service and parts repair solutions too. Writing content about this will build awareness and help increase the after-sale leads, such as booking a car service.

2. Optimise your locations’ listings on Google:

If you are a brand owner or if you are an agency optimising for a car brand, this is one of the most critical areas which needs focus. Here you will compete with other third party websites as you are managing the brand, and you will have the local pack listing ranking and the Google knowledge graph.

On mobile, usually, the location results will appear on the top of the SERP, so you will appear above the regular organic rankings even if the competitors’ content ranks better than you.

Not only will you get organic visibility and traffic from the location listings, but you will also get direct leads even without landing on the website. A lot of people call directly from the call button on the map listing, or they use it to check the location of your physical showroom or service centre to go there and complete a purchase. Google consumer reports showed that over 25% of auto shoppers call the service provider directly from the search result*.

You can also utilise your location listings by adding Google posts and product posts to promote your cars and offers. Even though until now, this part doesn’t reflect high engagement from users, it still is a fantastic place to build awareness and introduce your cars and offers.

3. Make your listings on the SERP richer by applying schema markups:

Having reviews, the car price and information about the car model appearing on your SERP listing will help to increase the CTR and get more quality organic traffic coming to your website.
Through Google Developers, Google provides support on all the scripts that you need to write valid schema markups.

4. Write about topics that interest your users:

Having a blog opens the door to having visibility on generic keywords, which in turn will help you engage and build a trusted relationship with your users. They will start seeing your website as a source of valuable information, and your business will be on top of their mind when they are considering their next purchase.

On top of that, you will have an excellent opportunity to do some internal linking and promote your other SEO pages, thus helping you to increase your rankings for those pages.

5. Improve the page load time and page speed:

It’s already known that page speed is now one of the main ranking factors, so having a fast page load time is mandatory. As an SEO marketer, you need to support the developers by providing them with Google page speed guidelines across all the pages using Google page speed insight and lighthouse tools.

Having a fast website doesn’t only help you increase your rankings, but it also helps you to increase engagement and conversions that come from your organic traffic. According to Google, 53% of mobile site visitors leave a page that takes longer than three seconds to load*.

These tips helped our SEO team to get the most out of their SEO campaigns in this region across several automotive brands that we worked on over the last couple of years, such as Toyota, Honda, Lexus, and many others.

*Sources:
Think With Google – Consumer Insights
Think With Google – Automobile Industry Mobile Search Trends
Think With Google – Mobile Page Speed New Industry Benchmarks