Want to increase your dealership’s online presence, but think link building is too scary or complicated? You might reconsider after you learn a few things you can do offline to earn local links.

Building local links for car dealerships requires a different mindset than most other businesses, but that’s a good thing. Car dealers have a unique knowledge set that can be useful to multiple link sources. Also, many car dealers are already involved with local groups, sporting events, car meetups, etc…

I’ve outlined a few basic link building tactics that any local business owner can use to earn local links.

Identify Link Opportunities

First and foremost, don’t fly blind if you can help it. If you’re willing to spend a few dollars, there are some excellent backlink tools you can use to identify which sites are linking to you, your competitors, and other local businesses. I lean towards Open Site Explorer or Ahrefs for checking and exporting links, but there are plenty of great tools out there.

Go to Open Site Explorer and export a .CSV of the backlinks for your competitors or similar local businesses. Feel free to use whatever method you prefer for sorting the links, but here’s a quick way:

Open up an Excel workbook; dump all of your links into one sheet – and your competitors’ links into separate sheets on the same workbook. If you’re a small or mid-sized dealer, you probably don’t have a ton of links to comb through. If you have a ton of links, just add Conditional Formatting to show the unique values between the data on sheets you’re comparing.

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