Search Engine Optimization has been hanging around as an industry buzzword for several years now. FordDirect websites claim to have a strong SEO base. Several vendors are out there selling their own SEO services to Ford and Lincoln dealers. Dealers often ask me how they’re doing and complain when they don’t show up at the top of the SERP. But what does SEO mean and what contributes to improving it?

MOZ recently released their 2015 SEO Study which ranks the top influences on organic website ranking on Google. They did this by combining the data of several industry partners with the expert opinions of the world’s top search marketers. Today we will break down their findings and discuss how to implement some best practices at your dealership.

Why not start with the best? Here are the Top 3 influencers on organic SERP ranking:

1. Domain-Level, Link Authority Features

Domain Link What? Let’s not overcomplicate things. Many of the influencers on this list sound scary and difficult to manage, so let’s try to keep it as simple as possible (without oversimplifying and diluting the impact). In its most basic terms, this influencer is describing the other domains that link to your website. So, where is your click traffic coming from and what other sites are linked to yours? The determining factors for relevance here are the quantity of unique domains linking to your domain (quantity counts, folks), the relevance of those domains to yours (stay on topic with your links, quality counts, too!), and the popularity and trust of the domains linking to yours (the more traffic they get and the more trusted their site is, the better the link for you). Ford and Lincoln dealers using FordDirect websites have a distinct advantage over their 3^rd party site competition here because our sites link back to Ford.com and Lincoln.com – extremely relevant, high traffic, and trusted by search engines. Checkmate.

2. Page-Level Link Metrics

Although domain level linking is the #1 influencer for your on-site SEO, it is important not to simply link all traffic to your home page and forget about the individual pages on your site. I won’t spend a lot of time on this topic, because it is quite similar to domain level linking, but there are a few points to note. Again, quantity of links is important for SEO, but again again, the relevance and trustworthiness of the source is also extremely important. One more thing to note about links at the page level – uniqueness is important and so is anchor text (the visible words and phrases that hyperlinks display). Make sure that your links and anchor text don’t link back to the same page repeatedly – too many links to your site from the same page or domain will water down the effectiveness of the linking.

3. Page-Level Keyword and Content-Based Metrics

We are staying on the individual page for #3. This influencer is all about what content is actually on your page. Keywords, Keywords, Keywords. Quantity is king here, but only if it is done correctly. There are no bonus points for drowning your page with repetitious metadata. Quality and relevance are key here yet again, but let’s get a bit more specific. Keywords are Key Words – these should be present in the page title, the main content of the page, the pages URL, anchor text, and the alt attribute of any images (this is the text that displays if for some reason a consumer cannot view the image). Moz also recommends to include close variants and/or synonyms of the keyword.

Honorable Mention:       Page-Level, Keyword-Agnostic Features

Seeing a theme here? The page is important! This category is kind of the “leftover” influence that doesn’t quite fit into link metrics or keyword/content metrics at the page level. Things like being mobile friendly, having good load times, having low bounce rates, overall design and user experience, unique and fresh content, use of images and video, and number of return visits to the page by web users count for SEO bonus points. Most of these are well within the control of the web developer to optimize. Overall usability and likeability of the site and page is very important. In fact, the 4^th most important thing to on-site SEO in 2015.

Alright, we’ve learned how to optimize our site for organic ranking, but what are some of our common mistakes that push us down the SERP page? Moz was also kind of enough to provide us with data on Negative Ranking Influencers.

Let’s dig into the Top 3 and make sure we aren’t falling victim to these SEO- killers.

1. Total Number of Unnatural Links to Page/Subdomain

We touched on this earlier when we talked about links to our sites, but it is so important that it also made #1 on the negative influencers list. Relevance! I’ll say it again: Relevance! There are many black hat SEO tactics intended to trick Google and other search engines into ranking your site higher on the SERP. This one is the biggest no-no. Google defines an unnatural link as “artificial, deceptive, or manipulative links pointing to your site… in order to manipulate PageRank” and will severely punish any page caught doing so. Buying links or trading links with other pages that are irrelevant are also examples of unnatural links. Basically, play by the rules and always keep relevance top of mind – or your Black Hat tactics could cause your site to be Black Balled from the SERP.

2. Page Content is Duplicate/Thin

I’ve combined Moz’s #2 and #3 negative influencers into one point here, because I think it makes sense for our level of discussion. Remember how quantity is king in terms of page level content? Well, not having a good amount of unique content can cause your pages to be viewed as irrelevant – actually hurting the PageRank of the individual page, which in turn negatively contributes to the overall SEO of your site as a whole.

3. Non-Mobile Friendly

You don’t have a mobile friendly website? Are you kidding me? Google has proclaimed that their latest algorithms take your sites mobile friendliness into account when determining ranking factors. This is both for mobile SERPs and desktop SERPs (although more of a factor on mobile. But hey, doesn’t over 1/3 of your site traffic come from mobile?)! If your site isn’t mobile optimized (we can discuss the differences between mobile, adaptive, responsive, and seamless sites in another blog), then you have a new top priority. Not sure if your site or an individual site on your page is mobile friendly? Click here to test you site or page using Google’s “Mobile-Friendly Test”. This is a wonderful resource that will actually tell you what is non-friendly about your site and what you can do to fix it.

Honorable Mention:       Amount of Over-Optimized Anchor Text to Page

Okay, okay, if you read the Moz article you see that I skipped right to their #5 for our #3. That’s because I combined #2 and #3 in one point and left #4 out altogether. What did they have for #4? Amount of over-optimized anchor text to page. Have you seen any dealers lately who are putting too many hyperlinks on their VDP’s or having too much targeted anchor text? I haven’t either. But if you are interested, you can check out an article about avoiding the over-optimization of anchor text here. See what I did there? It’s an anchor text joke. Eh??

But seriously, on-site SEO is extremely important to your business. There are many companies who claim to boost your SEO for BIG monthly fees. Some are legitimate, others are a money pit. Hopefully this data will help you discern the difference the next time someone pitches you an SEO package. Or, perhaps it will inspire you to learn more about SEO and take steps to increase your ranking on your own.

You are the master of your domain. Why not optimize it?