The more experience we have setting up automotive dealers with SEO, the more we see a common theme. Car dealers are used to getting something quantifiable for there money. They pay X dollars, they get X minutes of commercials on air or they get X ad space over X many days in a newspaper. That’s the way it’s always been, especially for people who’ve been in business a long time. Unfortunately, this just isn’t how SEO works…or at least, that shouldn’t be how it works. Let’s take a look at the demand for hard numbers in automotive SEO and the damage it can do to a dealer.

It starts with a dealer reading some antiquated information that SEO is all about the links. If they want to find material corroborating this belief, there are no shortage of morons on the internet agreeing with it. This gets the dealer in the mindset that they need backlinks, and lots of them. The more the better, and quality be damned. They start demanding to know what they are spending per backlink, and they want to be guaranteed X amount of backlinks per month. Luckily for them, there are plenty of SEO agencies that will deliver paid links like that. You know what we call them in the SEO industry?

Con artists.

The fact is that buying links or guaranteeing a set number of links just isn’t how SEO works anymore. Don’t let anyone tell you differently. You can get 1,000 links overnight, and if they’re from the wrong sources, your site can actually get penalized into oblivion. On the other hand, a single link from a relevant high PR domain can give you an enormous boost.

Don’t get stuck in the numbers game. When you’re dealing with automotive SEO in 2013, it’s definitely quality over quantity to win.