Proudly serving the industry for which it was named for more than 50 years, Outdoor Power Equipment provides dealers who sell and service outdoor power equipment with valuable information to succeed in a competitive market.
Issue link: https://read.dmtmag.com/i/141617
FEATURE STORY Five SEO mistakes that you shouldn't be making (anymore) I n June 2013 OPE, I busted five Search Engine Marketing myths. In this article, I'm going to turn our attention to Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and the five most common mistakes dealers make when using SEO. I've noticed a good trend and, at the same time, a bad tendency. The good trend: The majority of outdoor power equipment dealers recognize the importance of having a website that is search engine optimized and are interested in achieving top organic rankings on the search engines. The bad tendency: Most dealers believe that their website is fully optimized, just because it includes the standard pages, navigation, inventory and brands carried. The hard truth: The majority of websites are not as optimized as they could/should be. Read on. If you're making any of the following SEO mistakes, here are some easy fixes you can make to your website that will help drive more qualified traffic, generate more leads, and sell more products — online and in-store. Mistake #1 — Your website content is less than inspiring; in fact, it's blah. THE FIX: If you want your website to appear — and stay — at the top, the search engines must perceive your content as the 20 most relevant for the search query that the consumer has entered. Based on a complex algorithm, the search engine ranks all the sites it "sees" based on their relevance to any given query. The goal of every search engine is to put the most authoritative websites at the top. What does that mean to you? Having the right content — and the right amount of it — is mandatory. To be successful, your website must contain unique, compelling content that's relevant to the search terms that your audience is using. • Relevant keywords. Starting with your home page, make sure that every page contains 300 to 500 words of unique content peppered with your most relevant keywords. At a minimum, the home page should include a description of your dealership that is close to 300 words and includes words like "new equipment," "zero turn," "Toro," "Simplicity," "Service," "Financing," "your name," "your location" — all in an easy-toread format. This is the type of content that search engines look for and love! • Direct links. Use keywords to link consumers and spiders to relevant content throughout your site (e.g. clicking on "service" should immediately take the visitor to your service page). • Meta Tags. The most important meta tag on every page of your website is the Title Meta Tag. This tag (maximum of 70 OUTDOOR POWER EQUIPMENT characters) is what the search engines display when they find your website organically. In addition, a good way to positively impact your search rankings is to make sure that each page on your website details the unique content of a web page in as few words as possible (maximum of 160 characters) in a Description Meta Tag. The content in your description meta tag is usually what the search engines display below the results title when your website is found organically. That said, it's important that you include your company name, brands, services and products that are found on that page. Here's an example of how it works: When a consumer searches for "honda snowthrowers green bay," the search engines look at the title tag, description tag and content of each page on your website. Based on what they find, they return the most relevant web pages that match the search query. In this example, the number one organically ranked site was: The keywords contained in the title tag (headline) are normally highlighted in the results by search engines. The description that appears below the title is normally the content of your description tag. Here again, the search engine highlighted the keywords used in your search. Mistake #2 — Not so local. THE FIX: The majority of your website traffic and potential customers comes from your local marketplace, so your content should revolve around the local angle. What cities, towns and counties does your dealership serve? Spelling it out for the search engines will help you achieve top rankings. Use your area's top cities and towns in your content, web page titles and web page descriptions. Mistake #3 — No time for social media. THE FIX: Social media is the fastestgrowing area for search engine queries, now accounting for almost one third of the total search market, yet it's widely ignored by too many outdoor power dealerships. How current is your Facebook page? Do you even have one? Are you tweeting whenever you update your page? If you aren't currently actively involved www.outdoorpowerequipment.com Image above ©istockphoto.com/gdas By Blane Vik