Recovering An Automotive Dealership + 147% Traffic Increase!

Want to see how we increased a car dealership’s website traffic by 147%?
Then this case study is for you!

Like quite a few of our clients, this dealership didn’t come to us with a clean slate. Their rankings were dropping, their keywords were falling off, and their business was hurting.

See how we were able to recover them after a Google penalty and turn their traffic around:

Background:

This luxury car dealership was suffering massive penalties from a recent Google Update. They have several locations across the UK. So they wanted to target keywords that were low in traffic but were highly lucrative.

The goal of this campaign was to restore rankings from the penalty, thereby restoring traffic and improve the rankings of select keywords.

Step 1: The Audit

Every Snap Managed campaign begins with an audit.

A Google core update negatively impacted their site resulting in a significant loss of rankings. This was mainly due to having little content, duplicate pages (also with little content) and a high bounce rate.

Many auto dealerships have sites with only photos of their inventory. This is a huge problem, yet easy to fix and an excellent opportunity to win back their traffic!

They had a good, steady amount of traffic until this update hit. They were already using the self-serve option on our website and saw a bit of returning traffic. So they upgraded and upgraded to a Snap Managed plan a couple of months after using the a la carte self-serve options.

Improving Existing Page Rankings & Easy Wins

When we onboard any campaign, one of the first things we do is look at the existing pages. Are there any keywords we can boost to bring more traffic?

It is prevalent to find many clients who have pages and keywords that are close to ranking on the first page and generating traffic from keywords. When we identify keywords to identify easy wins, we look for the following metrics:

• A Keyword difficulty equal to or less than 30
• A minimum cost per click of $0.10
• A ranking between 4 to 30

Using this strategy, we can find keywords that are valuable and highly targetable pages and keywords that are on the brink of ranking but is not quite there.

At the start of this campaign, we identified 460 keywords that we can potentially target. Most of which were on the bottom of page 1 to page 3 and had a cost per click between 30 cents to $2.50

These pages and keywords were mostly product/sales pages that led to individual cars this dealership had available. The keywords were already getting traffic and had a low difficulty, and we capitalized on these early to dramatically increase traffic.

Competitive Gap Analysis

Once we identify the keywords, we deliver a one-two punch by completing a competitive gap analysis. First, we look for keywords that your competition is targeting, and you are not. Once we identify these keywords, we begin adding blog content targeting these newfound opportunities.

When doing search engine optimization for the automotive industry, it is important to note it is a bit different than some industries for completing the competitive gap analysis; you will find keywords that are not worth ranking and irrelevant (examples: geo-targeted words, specific makes and models etc.)

Most of the competing sites in this industry lack content. This gives us more leverage when targeting the easy wins and creating long blog content around them.

Through this campaign, we did monthly link building and content creation every month.

Results:

After targeting this site’s easy win key terms, we’ve bumped many of them to page 1. The top 10 keywords are currently all ranking on page 1:

Below is a graph showing the #1 exact matches after using only three months of Snap Managed SEO.

The Takeaway

After this client switched from an a la carte style seo program to our managed seo service they saw a dramatic increase in organic traffic month after month. Building quality, enterprise level content and a combination of our link building techniques (Snap Diversified Link Building and Snap Blogger Outreach) we are able to increase the sites value.

Looking at the image below the sites organic traffic, organic keywords, backlinks and value are consistently improving.

With consistency and hard work we were able to recover this sites organic traffic, brought many pages to page 1 and doubled the organic traffic!

If you would like some help with your site, have been penalized, or seen a significant drop in traffic you might be interested in our Snap Managed SEO packages.