Latest Insight

SEO For Auto Parts Sales

The auto parts industry has been growing and changing in recent years, and it is becoming increasingly important for dealerships to offer parts for sale online in order to stay in the competition. Many top ranking parts departments are now turning toward selling auto parts online at wholesale prices to earn additional revenue streams for the department. Selling online can include multiple channels such as your own web store, eBay, Amazon, WalMart and other third party providers. In this article we will focus on how to use search engine optimization techniques to sell more parts on your auto parts web store.

Create Meaningful Content

When you set out to write content for your auto parts web store, you need to make sure that you are giving customers the information necessary to make purchasing decisions. It is also important to keep in mind that not all customers know specifics about the parts they are looking for and if you have more detailed information that you can provide to them within the product description, editing this on the website can be a powerful tool for both customers and Google bots. For example, if a part has a value line option or some other characteristic, the product description is a great place to make note of that!

Show Product Images

Adding an actual product image can increase the likelihood that someone will want to buy a part from your site because they feel more confident that they know exactly what they will be getting. You can photograph the item unboxed as well as boxed to really add to the information available on the product page. Google also displays this image when you do Google shopping ads and having an image that stands out from the basic “diagram” image from the catalog data provider will help your ad to stand out from the rest.

Add Custom Meta Data

The catalog provider gives each part a meta title and description that all web stores within your same automotive brand have. This means that unless you or your marketing company alters this information, the product page data seen by Google for your site and other sites within your same brand will display the same information. Google prefers custom content over generic content and so anytime you can edit this data to show something more custom it is a good idea. OEM Interactive does update pages on your website each month, but with hundreds of thousands of parts within the catalog, it takes a long time to get to all of them. A dual approach where the dealership team and OEM tackle these gets them done faster and more efficiently.

Video Content Creation

Some of our marketing plans call for dealers to create shot videos of the products and their use, description and other information. You send these videos to us and we optimize them, load them to YouTube and then feature them on the website product page. Google ranks pages with interactive content higher and YouTube is a leader in website traffic so this combination will help drive up the organic indexing of pages on your website.

Post To Forums

A great way to drive outside referral traffic to your auto parts web store is to become a trusted authority on popular automotive forums. You can do a basic Google search for forums within your brand and then register as a user in order to respond to basic questions and concerns posted by other users on the forum. The last thing you want to do is SPAM the forum and get kicked off, but if you respond genuinely to concerns and questions from people posting online then you can plug your store without sounding like a spam bot. For instance, if someone describes an issue where it sounds like they need to replace their throttle body and you suggest this as the possible issue and then post a coupon code that will give them a discount when ordering from your parts site.

No matter how you choose to promote your web store, doing something is better than nothing. Google wants to see websites that are active, up to date and consistently being relied upon by customers as the highest within search results. Our job at OEM Interactive is to help do this for you and best prioritize your marketing budget. These are a few simple ways that parts managers can also help to promote the web store in order to gain organic traffic that is not paid for and speed the process of becoming a top authority within your brand. Our success is determined by your success and our customers are always our partners!

Related content