Aftermarket auto parts businesses are generally considered a regular brick-and-mortar style of business. But not anymore. Even if a customer visits your business offline, in person, they often start the transaction by researching a certain product and the store online.
Going one step further, your customer base isn’t just limited to the local area or national customers. People from all around the world can now access your business. Especially car enthusiasts, they love getting the best parts from around the world for their project cars or auto mechanic shops.
A recent study by Google shows that nearly 25% of all automotive searches are for spare parts, auto services, and generic maintenance activities. One out of every two mobile shoppers who search for auto parts online calls the store upfront from the search results to inquire. This means you can gain almost 50% more leads and sales by building a strong online presence.
But, how are they gonna find you? Or, even your local customers? Getting a website and listing your parts online isn’t enough. You’re a nobody online unless you start promoting your business.
In this article, we’ll share some proven SEO tips that you can use to push your website high in search results and start getting more clicks and leads for your auto parts business.
Table of Contents
Table of Contents
1. Use Dynamic SEO Tagging
Being an auto parts seller, you have a large range of auto parts to sell through your online store. And you want each product page to be easily discovered by customers for fast sales. Well, there’s nothing wrong with it. We all love fast results.
However, you can’t rush while doing SEO for auto parts stores. Doing SEO tagging for each page is a time-consuming task, as there are hundreds of categories and thousands of product pages to optimize.
That’s where dynamic SEO tagging can help you.
Dynamic SEO tagging is a more effective and faster approach. This strategy involves dynamic tagging of page titles, meta descriptions, and other SEO elements for better results. Dynamic tagging allows SEO experts (working on your website) to fetch details of different categories and product names easily and automatically fill different content fields, instead of doing each page separately.
2. Build Strong Local Backlinks
Backlinks are a big deal. SEO experts who claim they are not a major factor now are dumb. I mean, seriously. Backlinks, especially those from local sources, play a significant role in achieving high search rankings. For your automotive spare parts business, it’s about relevance and vicinity, not just high-quality backlinks.
Backlinks are one of the major ranking signals that help Google to define your authority and set your search rankings.
You can start with community partnerships or PR on local news sites.
Here are some quick ideas to get organic backlinks for your automotive business.
- Sponsor a local racing or football team
- Publish guest posts on automotive websites
- Get featured on your vendors and manufacturers’ websites
- Participate in local auto parts events
If you have a business or finance partner, ask them to feature your business and link back to you. The more targeted backlinks you have, the higher you rank.
However, focus on building organic backlinks only. Malpractices such as buying low-quality backlinks can harm you more than doing good. Quality always wins over quantity.
3. Grow Your Reviews Profile
Reviews are one of the first things people notice before making a purchase. This is their trust signal that will define how trusted and reliable your business is. It doesn’t matter whether you’re selling auto parts or a generic e-commerce store. Having a strong reviews profile can contribute significantly to sales.
Reviews impact both buyer trust and your local search rankings. Google uses reviews as signals (like frequency and keywords) as part of its local ranking algorithm. So, if you’re ignoring reviews, better start working on it.
Start by encouraging your existing happy customers to leave a 5-star review on your Google Business Profile. It doesn’t matter whether they bought a small car plug or got an oil change. The more specific, relevant, and recent the review is, the better it is for you. You can also encourage your customers to leave reviews on your business profile on other platforms such as TrustPilot and Clutch.co to enhance the authority, reliability, and trust of your business.
Don’t fake your reviews to manipulate Google. He’s smarter than you think and can easily pick up on spammy content. Focus on authentic experiences, and respond to every genuine review you get—even the bad ones. A thoughtful reply to a negative review often helps your business to build trust than an always-perfect 5-star rating.
4. Reduce your Site Load Time
Check your website load time across all platforms and devices. It must be under two seconds. If it’s above that, that’s alarming. Here’s how. Let’s say you’re ranking in local results, and a visitor clicks on your website, it takes more than two seconds. Guess what? They bounce back.
Slow load time means higher bounce rates. The best way to reduce this is by removing unnecessary images and videos and optimizing your overall page content that takes more time to load.
5. Focus on Long-tail Keywords
Most people don’t search generic terms like “car dealership or sedan auto parts.” They search for more specific queries, queries that are relevant to their problems. For instance, “used Honda Accord under 20k in Louisiana” or “best family SUV under 40k.” These are long-tail keywords with low competition and much higher intent.
To target long-tail keywords, you can build your pages around these models:
- For Specific models: “2018 Toyota Camry for sale in Houston”
- Services-focused: “oil change service alignment for Honda Civic near me”
- Parts-related: “Land Rover Defender bumpers online”
- Financing needs: “0% markup offers for college students”
This is where your dealership blog or FAQ pages come in. You need to create content that focuses on the questions your buyers are Googling. For instance, “Best fuel-efficient sedans under 25k” or any other most searched question like that.
Conclusion
Automotive SEO differs from traditional practices and requires a customized approach. From dynamic tagging to backlinks, building strong reviews, and optimizing your load times, everything is completely different.
We hope this article helps you with some unique, yet important SEO tips that you should master while building an online presence for your automotive business. Take these points into consideration, and you’re good to go with your SEO.
