It’s not easy to gain measurable results for automotive websites. There are so many variables involved in how the search engines will actually rank your site that nobody can promise or guarantee results. Not only are there more than 200 ranking factors, but the search engine keeps on moving the goal posts.
For these reasons I’m really not fond of writing a page that focuses on getting results for automotive websites. With that said, potential customers often ask me what the possibilities are. And the simple answer to that question is it depends on the amount of work you’re willing to put into the website.
When we build automotive websites for ourselves, we go after it hard. In the screenshots featured on this page we’re talking about growing a website from about five pages, to a total footprint of 90 pages. This meant we had to post one or two articles per week for an entire year. But that wasn’t the only work that brought the results for this automotive website.
The Foundation of an Automotive Website
It’s like when you build a house. You can’t start putting up the walls and the cathedral ceilings until a strong foundation exists. It’s the automotive content that provides the strong base that supports overall growth. Therefore, we can say that starting with a page that meets standard quality guidelines remains the all important first step.
After we lay this foundation it’s time to build some links from other relevant websites that point to this content. The car content writer doesn’t believe in traditional link building. However, we do believe in reaching out to others in the transportation vertical through the use of our specialized automotive social networks.
If we provide unique or educational information, that page gains links naturally. And this is what the search engines are looking for. If you try to game the system by artificially building links, they know it and penalize your business website. Unfortunately, doing things the right way builds results for automotive websites over a long period of time. Customers often look for immediate or fast results when they pay for something.
Although we started seeing major growth within five or six months it’s the growth in the last two or three months of this past year that’s impressive. Nevertheless, the most important thing to learn from doing things the right way and following the rules is the results become long-lasting. What we learned are the companies that tried to unseat us from the top positions failed, because they tried to use quick tricks. This meant that even if they beat us in the total link count, the quality of the content and the links didn’t measure up to ours.
Circumstances beyond our Control
As we mentioned in the opening paragraph the search engines keep moving the goal posts. Some of the factors that have more weight on them today than in the past are beyond our control. As an example, site speed and mobile compatibility have become two major updates in the ranking algorithms.
These two factors rely on the strength of the hosting plan that the auto repair shop signed up for. In other words the server response time and the speed that it renders content are somewhat beyond our control. With that said, we do have the capability to make some improvements. We can compress the images on your website and reduce the load on your shared server using some of the automotive website software in our arsenal.
In addition, the age of your website and the platform that it’s deployed across often determines how well it’s viewed from the wide variety of mobile devices. Again, we do have the capability to improve these metrics on websites that use content management systems with some flexibility.
Analyzing our Results for Automotive Websites
We built a website from the ground up, on a mobile first framework. We built the site to perform well from the very beginning. This allowed us to grow quickly. With that said, you can see that it took a full year to reach a visitor count of 30,000 views a month. Your established website has a few factors working for and against it.
It’s believed that search engines take into account the age of the domain. This would be a check mark in the win column for your older website. However, a legacy platform on an old shared server can work against you. In the end, the results we’re able to obtain depend on the individual situation.
We can say that we often find the difference between a page 1 ranking and a page 2 ranking for car repair websites very small. When the competition outranks you, using a cookie-cutter website, overtaking them with the addition of quality content and site optimization exists.