Alexa!
Hey Siri!
Hey Google!
If those audible prompts aren’t something you regularly use to search, shop, and interact online, you are about to be in the minority. By 2020, it has been forecasted that 50% of all online searches will be performed via voice search.
That may be a daunting stat if you don’t already have an SEO strategy for your automotive dealership that takes voice search into consideration. Luckily, you have some time – only around 20-30% of searches are currently conducted by voice.
Voice Search and Local SEO for Car Dealers
Consumers are regularly searching for local businesses via voice search. In fact, 58% of consumers have used voice search to find a local business within the last year. And 46% of voice search users look for local businesses on a daily basis.
As a car dealer, this means that you need to have your site optimized for local SEO. Title tags, meta description, and on-site content that feature rich geo-targeted keywords in the main pages like SRP and VDP and ongoing content pages are vitally important. A custom organic SEO strategy that gains your relevance within the markets that you want to pull customers from is key.
This includes custom pages in addition to the interior site pages. Geo-targeted automotive landing pages, pages on local sales and events, and much more are able to give a car dealer website the relevance it needs to stand out in local search – and in turn, voice search.
The other vital factor of local SEO and voice search is having your Google My Business page fresh and updated. Make sure your business hours, phone number, address, and all the essential information about your dealership are completely current. This information can help your dealership be found first by someone who is looking for a dealership using a voice search. Getting your dealership to show up and then directing the consumer there via a map app is a quick way to make a sale, as consumers visit fewer dealers in person than ever.
Voice Search and Vehicle Specific Searches
Another opportunity with voice search can be found in the form of vehicle-specific searches. Having your site’s SEO structured to show up for relevant vehicle listings is a great way to get someone on your site via voice search. This includes pages that feature informative, digestible content about a given vehicle that will increase a dealership’s relevance and chance to be offered up to specific voice search queries.
Featured snippets are a prime example of a great SEO voice strategy. These are the “0 results” that Google provides on a SERP that lay out the answer to the search query higher than the first result. While this Google tactic is much maligned by SEO professionals who feel that Google is taking away clicks, it’s actually a huge opportunity for those who know how to leverage it properly.
While getting the featured snippet has proven to increase traffic in traditional searches due to the prominence on the search results page, this feature is truly built for voice search. These results are what is read aloud by the voice search assistant when a specific query is spoken.
As a quick example, the search “What color does the 2019 Honda Accord come in?” has a featured snippet for Howdy Honda on Google. If you asked the Google Assistant, it would read off what that result says under the snippet itself by starting “According to Howdy Honda…” The same can be said for Bing results with Alexa, and so on.
“Hey Google – What Color Does the 2019 Honda Accord Come In?”
The brand equity and search relevance for Honda-related terms skyrocket for a given dealership from this kind of result. That kind of “Google-approved” spoken advertising proves that Google trusted the content on that page at that dealership enough to reward it as the answer of choice.
The same can be done in terms of content on a local level with voice search. In this way, a dealership can flex its dominance in its local area and with its brand, which has always been a great content marketing SEO tactic and gets even more pronounced thanks to voice search.
Voice Search for Automotive and Schema
The final piece of having a fully fleshed-out automotive voice search strategy is having schema markup, or structured data, on your site. Essentially, schema markup is the language of search engines that was created from a collaborative effort between Google, Bing, Yahoo, and Yandex in 2011. And since the search engines created the language, implementation of this tactic is naturally going to help your site’s search relevance.
The connection between schema markup and voice search is seamless, as Google and the other search engines will automatically make marked-up information searchable by assistants. From automotive-specific schema markup on main pages to Q&A markup for ongoing content pieces, the assistants can get consumers to your dealership’s site through the right markup and SEO strategy.
Putting It All Together
With voice assistant usage exploding on mobile phones and with home assistants, optimizing your website for voice search is a clear path to dominance. This can be achieved through SEO tactics, with a few tweaks to ensure that the strategy not only works for traditional online search – but also voice search.
At DealerFire, the team leads the way in SEO strategy, from on-site SEO to local and content marketing. To learn more about the strategy and what’s coming next, contact our winning team.
