If you aren’t too keen on search engine optimization, I’m here to help you whether you’re going to SEO your website yourself or outsource it. First thing's first, you must always have a strategy.

Pre-Plan
Search engines consider a number of factors when determining how to index. For example, the way the pages of your site link together (i.e. the information architecture) will determine how easy it is for search engines to crawl and index. Also, the speed at which your pages load is a strong signal to search engines about the usability of your site.

Keyword Research
What are customers typing into search engines in order to find you? You need to know what content is most appropriate to your target audience and what they are looking for. You also need to know what title to give your homepage, your product pages, your category pages, etc.

Keyword research is the process of finding out which search terms to go after to maximise the amount of traffic and, more importantly, conversions (form leads, sign-ups etc.) that your site attracts.
You can use the free Google Adwords Keyword Tool to retrieve approximate search volumes and ranking difficulty for each keyword and to get keyword suggestions.

Competitor Analysis
Once you’ve come up with some terms and headlines, it’s time to see how your competition ranks in relation to those keywords. Make sure you are signed out of Google when you search for each term to see which dealerships show up on the first page or else your search result will be biased.

Content Strategy
Simply replicating what your competitors are doing isn’t going to get you ranked above them any time soon. Search engines love fresh content, so create a blog and draft social media posts at least twice a week. Try creating buyer personas profiles, for your ideal customers, in order to help you decide how you would go about addressing those customers’ concerns or filling their needs. Do your ideal customers have a salary of over six figures? What are their paint points? Why do they usually buy from you? Answering these types of questions will help you build your buyer personas.

There you have it! Remember, improving your search engine rank by SEOing your website doesn’t happen overnight. Give search engines the time to process your website, I’d say at least a week or so and check to see where you rank.

Do you have any suggestions for improving SEO ranking? Please share them in the comments section below!