All businesses start SEO campaigns so they can rank number one in the SERPs. But that is not the only goal when it comes to SEO, ultimately you need to be able to turn that extra traffic you receive from ranking number 1 into sales. As most of you in the automotive industry should know sales don’t come from traffic they come from conversions.
In any successful Automotive SEO campaign you need to have landing pages that are optimized not only to rank on Google but also to convert your traffic. Success of a landing page is not measured by how well you rank for the keywords in the content, it’s measured by how much traffic you are converting into leads, that can later be sold a car. Of course there’s no way to make your landing page traffic buy a car, but there are ways to persuade them.
When it comes to your landing pages you have to get and maintain the users attention quickly. Start by making sure the header/title of the page and the content in it are relevant to the search term that brought them there. You want the user to know right away that what they are searching for can be found on your site.
Always write in the second person in the copy for your landing page. People want to know one thing when they click on a link in the Google SERPs, what can this site, this company, do for me? By writing in the second person you are speaking directly to the potential customer, engaging them, and making them feel like they are your first priority. They are aren’t they?
Writing for your landing page has to be clear and concise, that’s what converts traffic. Don’t just cut down everything to only a few paragraphs, the copy can be as long, or short, as it needs to be but make sure it’s lean, only touching on the important stuff. Keeping your readers engaged will keep them on site longer and increase your chances of converting them to a lead.
Include a call to action somewhere on the landing page. Having a lead generation form right on your landing page is ideal but if you don’t at least make sure you are directing the user to a page where they can submit a lead. Again, all of your SEO efforts are purely academic if you don’t convert your traffic into leads.
Writing for the web is actually very simple, as long as you have a little vision. try to get a feel for what the user will see when they first visit your landing page before you write the copy. Stick to short paragraphs and stay away from overly flowery language. Keep it simple, people tend to scan more when reading on the internet so take advantage of bullet points and subheadings also.
Driving traffic to your site is definitely an important part of Automotive SEO but what is really important is what you can do with that traffic once it’s there. It’s up to you to optimize your landing page or pages to turn your traffic into leads and eventually into sales.
Need help designing and optimizing a landing page? Maybe you’re looking to move beyond the landing to something more powerful like a micro-site. Contact Wikimotive for a free evaluation of your SEO strategy and your landing page optimization.