Dealer SEO in plain English: what a search engine needs from your website

SEO has a reputation for jargon and guesswork. Strip that away and it comes down to something simple: helping a search engine understand each page on your website well enough to show it to the right person. Here is what that takes, without the mystery.

One clear page for each thing

A search engine matches searches to pages. So the first rule is to have a page for each thing someone might look for: each vehicle, each make and model you stock, each service you offer, each question you can answer. One long page that tries to cover everything is harder to match to anything.

A title and description that say what the page is

Every page has a title and a short description, which search engines read and usually show in their results. The title is the most useful single thing to get right. It should say plainly what the page is — the year, make and model for a vehicle, the subject for an article — and then who you are.

Details in a form a machine can read

A person reads a vehicle page and understands that one number is the price and another is the mileage. A search engine is helped by having those facts labelled. That labelling is called structured data. You should never have to write it yourself: a dealer platform should add it to every vehicle for you.

Pages that load, on a phone

A page that is slow, or awkward on a phone, serves buyers badly, and search engines take that into account. Sensibly sized photos and a clean layout do most of the work.

Tidy housekeeping

• A sitemap — a list of your pages, kept current, for search engines to follow.
• One address for each page — so near-copies do not compete with each other.
• Redirects — when an address changes, old links should still arrive somewhere.
• A secure connection — the padlock in the address bar.

Then, content worth finding

Everything above makes a page understandable. It does not make it worth reading. That part is yours: honest descriptions, good photos, and articles that answer the questions buyers really have.

How MotoVend handles it

On a MotoVend website the housekeeping — sitemap, single addresses, redirects, structured data and a secure connection — is automatic. You steer the rest with title templates, landing pages and search settings on every page. See the SEO tools.