Editor’s note: We know how important SEO is to our business chances. While medium and large store owners can afford to take professional ecommerce SEO marketing services, small businesses don’t have the privilege to do that. If you are one of them or have just started, this post is for you. Though this mainly focuses on automotive businesses, the core SEO principles remain the same.
If you are an automotive aftermarket manufacturer/retailer and have not so far invested on automotive-specific SEO services, you’re doing yourself a big disservice.
In 2018 almost 52% of all traffic generated by auto parts website were via organic searches.
Since a majority of aftermarket manufacturers now have an online presence the competition has only gotten tougher which is why setting your website SEO right is worth attention.
Here are some tips that can help you get started with automotive SEO for better rankings and search presence.
Best SEO Strategies For Auto Parts (Automotive Aftermarket) Business
1. Use Auto Part Numbers In Your Content
You have to take into consideration your audience. While you might be getting a lot of your order from auto parts shops, you will also have queries from people looking to buy parts for their personal vehicle. You cannot expect every person to know what part they’re looking for by name. Auto part numbers come in really handy in such cases, both for the people looking to make a purchase as well as you as a seller.
Now since you probably have a high number of parts, you’ll end up spending way too much time optimizing for them all. The best scenario for you would be to do a little bit of research beforehand. What kinds of parts have a good search volume and how profitable is each part for you? Based on your research you should prioritize the SEO.
2. Keep Updating Your Content With Dynamic SEO Strategies
As I’ve already mentioned above most auto part businesses will have a large inventory. Not only do you have multiple items of the same product, but you also have to keep in inventory multiple items for a variety of products. If you decide to go page by page for each product you’ll end up spending way too much time to do SEO and not enough servicing your clients. You should definitely look into getting all the parts covered you can spread out the tasks over several months or even years.
A better solution for you though would be to associate dynamic tagging for your SEO titles and meta descriptions. Dynamic tags help you pull up details about your product names and categories and automatically populate them into the title and description field.
3. Use Compatible Parts Display
For most online auto part businesses to hold every item available for every car on the market is seemingly impossible. However, most parts do come with substitutes.
Say for instance a customer is looking for a radiator. While he was looking for part number 0A7BN8C-1 you know for a fact that you don’t have it in stock. What happens next? If you don’t use compatible parts search on your product page you’re going to be sure of losing out on that customer. On the other hand, since you know of another part that would be perfect for them, why not pitch that instead of losing a customer outright.
Big online shopping brands do this very well. If you consider Amazon you’ll see that they always display a list of products similar to the one you are currently browsing. You’ve done the tough task of getting them onto your website. The only thing that now remains is for you to convince them about buying the alternative instead of the original product they were looking for.
Granted it might not be the same brand they were looking for but it’s your job (and that of your website) to convince them to buy the alternative. Displaying pictures of the alternative product along with user reviews and a rating chart can greatly enhance the chances of your customer choosing to buy an alternative rather than the unavailable original.
4. Include Auto Manufacturer Details In Your Descriptions and Titles
Most people know exactly what they’re looking for. After all, they’ve done their deliberation and are in that stage of their customer journey where they are looking to buy the product. Research shows us that in such scenarios prospective customers tend to use a more long-tailed keyword instead of shorter ones.
For instance, if you own a BMW and are looking for some new brake pads, instead of doing a random search like “brake pads” your search will be more specific. You would most likely type in “brake pads for BMW X5 2015 model”. What you’ll notice is that the search is very specific, they mention not only the car manufacturer but the model of the car and the year in which it was built/sold.
If you include these details in your titles, your meta descriptions, the content of your page, your website will be much more likely to feature in the search results. You should try to use as many variations of the long tail keywords in your content as you can. To give you an example the search query could be broken down into:
- Item-Manufacturer-Car-Manufacturer-Model-Year or
- Car-Manufacturer-Model-Year-Item-Manufacturer
There are even more variations you can try by mixing up the order of the components given in the search.
5. Optimize Specifications Of Each Part
Auto parts can be expensive. You wouldn’t want to shell out a ton of money only to realize that the part does not fit the car. What really helps with this regard is to check out the specifications of the product. Which is what most customers do. Let’s assume that you rank well on Google and the prospective customer is on the landing page. If you don’t have the specifications mentioned he’ll probably be swinging by your competitors to buy the product.
Detailed specifications also help because you have an opportunity to be featured on the snippets section of Google which have higher visibility and click through rate. Also since people know exactly what they’re going to get right in the search page chances of them looking around your competitor’s stores are minimal.
Another benefit that comes from optimizing specifications is that if you broaden your chance of being seen on Google. If your customer is looking for product A (which you don’t stock), which has the same specifications as product B (which you have in stock) then maybe the customer will end up buying product B from your website. As a part of your specifications, you should also try and include the car models the car is compatible with. If the buyer notices his car listed he may not even go through the specifications and you’ll end up making a sale anyway. Just make sure to keep the data on your website, relevant, authentic, and accurate.
Conclusion
You can use these tricks to gain an advantage over your competition in the online auto parts business. A few of these pointers could seem complicated but they’re really not.
Get in touch with us for a quick free Automotive Aftermarket SEO assessment of your automotive parts website: https://ebizondigital.com/contact/