147% Traffic Increase for a Car Dealership - SEO Case Study

Want to see how we improved a car dealership's website traffic by 147%?

Then this is a case study that you're going to enjoy!

Like a few of our clients, this car dealership didn't come to us with a clean history. Their current SEO rankings were dropping, their keywords were falling, and their business's sales were directly affected by it.

We were able to help them after a Google penalty and turn their traffic around and upward trending:

Let's walk through it:

Background

This client is a car dealership with several different locations based out of the UK. Their specific niche is high-end luxury vehicles.

Most search terms they want to target have search volume on the lower end but are incredibly lucrative to their business.

Their goal was first to get their traffic back and improve their rankings for a few key pages.

Here's how we did it:

First Things First – The SEO Audit

The first thing we always do when we get a new site is to audit the website's SEO history.

This client experienced a significant drop in their rankings because of the Google Core Algorithm Update in May, but we explained this happens all of the time and not panic because it's something we can help them recover from.

This site's search rankings were affected due to having light and duplicate pages with barely any content and a high bounce rate. If you don't know, a bounce is a single-page session on your site. A high bounce rate on your website generally means that users aren't interested in the content you're publishing, thus leading to a bad search experience.

This problem is common amongst car dealerships because most website pages are primarily just showing car inventory pages. That also means there is a huge opportunity to win the traffic back!

Initially, this car dealership had started using our service for link-building only, and they began to see some of the traffic returning. From there, they decided to trust us with fully managing their SEO presence. This included blog content creation, blogger outreach (guest posts), local citations, reputation management, video content creation for YouTube, and more!

Concentrating On Improving Existing Pages Rankings & Traffic With Easy Win Keywords

One of the first things we take a look at when working on a client's SEO is improving traffic to existing pages they currently have.

It's normal to find that many websites are close to ranking on page one and getting traffic, but they aren't in the top positions yet.

For this, we run our easy wins keyword analysis and find keywords that the site is ranking for with the following metrics:

• Positions 4-30 with

• Keyword Density (KD) equal to or less than 30

• Minimum CPC .01

By doing this, we could locate targetable, relevant keywords and web pages on the brink of ranking and quickly improved.

We found 460 possible targets on this website, mostly on the bottom of page one through page three, with CPC between $0.30 and $2.50.

These terms and specific URLs were primarily specific product pages directing to particular cars available at the dealership. The keywords targeted have low difficulty, meaning they're easier to rank for, and we can benefit from these keywords to quickly increase traffic.

Competitive Gap Analysis (what's this?)

In our onboarding process, the next thing we do is look at the keywords that your direct competitors are targeting that you are not yet and then concentrate on building out high-quality content for these keyword opportunities.

The auto and car industry is quite different in terms of content gap analysis.

When analyzing the auto industry's competitive gap, you'll typically find unnecessary keywords that are not worth targeting (i.e., particular car models, geo-targeted keywords, etc.)

Most of the top competing websites in this particular niche are thin on blog content, which enabled us to target the easy wins and create long-form blog content around them.

Every month, we delivered deliverables consisting of high-quality link building, strategic content, business citations, videos, reviews, and more.

SEO Results

After targeting this site's easy win keywords, we've bumped many of them to page one. The top ten keywords are currently all ranking on page one:

Here's an example of their number one exact match keyword that experienced significant movement after the three month result period of using our SEO services.

Takeaway

When this client let us begin delivering various SEO deliverables every month, their organic search traffic and search traffic value began to increase every month consistently.

We concentrated our efforts on building out quality blog content on the site and combining our link-building techniques, including guest posts, broken link method, and business citations.

As you can see in the image below, the website's backlinks, organic keywords, organic traffic, and the value of their traffic are consistently improving as well.

After a few consistent months of solid work, we've recovered this website's organic search traffic, increased several of their keywords up to page one, and doubled their overall organic traffic value!

If you'd like some help with your website's SEO (no matter if you've had a search penalty or drop in traffic), get in touch with our SEO agency today to discuss how we can help you and your website!