SEO Strategies for Powersports Dealers

Search engine optimization (SEO) is essential for your powersports dealership’s website to rank organically and bring in high-quality traffic. SEO is an investment in the future, that you can also start benefiting from today.

Optimize Your CMS

The first step toward optimizing your powersports dealership’s site is understanding your content management system (CMS). Your CMS is the software application that you log into to edit and manage your site. Each CMS is different and your ability to edit every aspect of your site depends on your site provider and CMS limitations. WordPress, the CMS we recommend for website clients, is known for its built-in SEO capabilities.

Spend some time getting to know what level of control and support your CMS provides. For example, can you add custom HTML, reorder the navigation, use iframes, edit URLs, or add a blog? Knowing the limitations is essential for planning new landing pages, optimizing technical factors, and improving user experience.

This is also a good time to make sure your CMS provides the same high-quality experience for mobile device shoppers as desktop shoppers. Mobile device users continue to dominate online traffic, and as a result, Google’s mobile-first indexing prioritizes mobile-friendly sites. Sites that don’t render properly on phones and tablets simply won’t rank as well in search results.

Think Like a Search Engine Bot

Your site needs to be as easy as possible for search engines to understand – and that starts with bots. The process for Google to understand the structure and content of your site, and why it should appear on a search engine results page (SERP) begins with crawling. The bots first crawl known URLs thanks to sitemaps provided by site owners and past crawls. Crawling each URL individually, bots use page links to navigate and discover new pages, as well as note changes to existing pages and dead ends due to broken links.

You can improve the ability of bots to crawl your site by optimizing the technical ranking factors. Use Google Search Console to check your sitemap, make sure all pages are being indexed, address any outstanding crawl errors, or request a recrawl. Navigate through the pages and posts in your CMS, adding internal link citations, alt attributes to images, and schema markup to your address and contact information. The effort you put into optimizing your site for search engines also benefits your shoppers. Title tags, meta descriptions, and headers are important to explain page content to bots as well as shoppers. Focus on making them concise and descriptive so bots and users alike can quickly skim each page and know what it is about.

Think Like Your Customers

While it is important that your site is optimized for bots to understand, the ultimate SEO goal is to make sure that you’re reaching your target audience with the content that motivates them to engage with your site. 

Think about the different journeys your powersports customers may take to conversion and how to support each journey with the pathways and information on your site. Consider the high- and low-funnel questions shoppers have and the research they conduct online. Then use landing page content on your site to provide answers where it makes sense. Optimize each landing page with unique, informative copy and interactive features such as payment calculators that remove barriers to conversions.

Create High-quality Content

Your website is the foundation of your powersports dealership’s online presence — use it to show potential customers what sets your business apart. 

Prioritize creating unique, high-quality content for your general inventory pages, model-specific inventory pages, contact or directions page, and homepage. Optimize title tags, meta descriptions, headers, calls-to-action, and images on each page using one to three relevant geo targets and three or more related keywords. Avoid adding too many geo targets and keywords so that your SEO strategy remains focused. And remember to focus the attention of shoppers on your site with clear and limited calls to action.

On an ongoing basis, make sure that all of the pages on your site are up to date. Pages with expired sales or promotion details create a poor user experience and can result in high bounce rates. 404 errors from broken links create dead ends for bots and users and can similarly hurt your rankings. 

Set a Long Term Plan

Ultimately, successful SEO is a continuous process and not a one-time task to be checked off your to-do list. To climb to the top of relevant SERPs and maintain your rankings once you’re there, you should ensure that the foundation of your site is strong, and plan on steadily making strategic updates to your site. 

A good habit to develop is spending time on your site monthly, thinking through the customer journey, and establishing optimization priorities using historic site performance, local research and demand, keyword rankings, competition, search trends, brand awareness, and seasonal trends. If you can, consider optimizing off-site factors like Google My Business, social media, and reviews that are linked back to your site.

What’s Next?

These tips are a good place to start, but if SEO feels like an increasingly complicated to-do, consider a digital provider who understands the breadth and depth of on- and off-site optimization tactics. Learn more about working with Adpearance with a free digital analysis to see how your powersports dealership stacks up against the competition.