1.

Write for People AND for Robots (Search Engines)

Why It's Important:

We always say that our websites are made for robots to find the people. We craft original keyword-filled content to make your website compete with that carwash down the road. We make your content relevant to your audience, fit the community you serve (we don't want to sell salt removal in Florida), and optimized for robots (a.k.a. search engines). And we'll try to make it as error-free as possible, but when it comes to car wash, carwash, or auto wash, Google gives us a little wiggle room.

Best Practices:

Search engines like Google can easily detect content that is stolen or duplicated from other carwash websites. Google also downgrades websites that contain errors or ones that are keyword-stuffed with non-related content. Some website builders link unrelated web pages to your website to make your site look bigger, like those annoying recipe blogs. But Google knows better... if you're a car wash, why would you have a recipe blog?

Focus on creating REAL content for your audience that naturally incorporates relevant keywords that matches your industry without bloating your site with spam.

2.

Add a Blog to Your Site and Use Rich Media

Why It's Important:

Search Engines love websites that are updated regularly. By maintaining an active blog, you continually add new content to your site, which signals to search engines that your site is active and relevant. When you include images and videos, you engage your site visitors and blog readers, create posts that include non-textual media like photos, videos, or original visualizations (infographics).

Best Practices:

Follow what we're doing on this page! We're following the advice we give! Having that extra content, especially if it's captivating, will increase the time users spend on your site and the likelihood they will share your site with their own community. In this case, we also want to show our customers the value of what we do behind the scenes to make sure that our websites work great compared to other sites.

3.

Offer a Positive User Experience Throughout Your Site

Why It's Important:

Some people say that Google can tell if you're using your site to aggressively advertise your service or if you're being too pushy. We have not found any evidence of that, but we have found that websites get less traffic when links are broken, pages are deleted, and buttons are not set-up. So we like to run through it with our customers to make sure everything works.

Best Practices:

This is one of those do what we say, not what we do sorts of situations. While we do this for our customers, our own website kind of gets ignored. Mel only gets a chance to update our website once a year - usually on Christmas Vacations when the Grandmas and Grandpas are keeping our kiddos busy. Anyway, always aim to offer your car wash website visitors a pleasant experience on your site. This means clear content, listing your chemicals and services, and offering support when needed, with always having an option to go back or back to the top of a page.

4.

Create a Network of Internal Links

Why It's Important:

Internal links help users navigate your site and provide additional context to your content.

Best Practices:

Add links between different pages of your site and your blog organically. Link between pages that make sense; for example, on your services page, link a certain industry-specific term to a blog post that gives more information on that term. On your wash menu page, link through to your unlimited membership program to drive sales.

5.

Always Check Your Site's Core Web Vitals

Why It's Important:

Core Web Vitals are a site performance standard created by Google. While other search engines use other tools and rules, lots of them just pay Google to use their robots to crawl pages, so the Google website rules tend to be THE RULES (apart from any legal rules, which you should follow those too). And no, Google Core Web Vitals and Google Analytics are not the same; they serve different purposes within the realm of website performance and user experience. There are SO MANY Google tools out there, we're just scraping the surface here.

Best Practices:

The report shows site owners how their site pages perform in real life, how long it takes for site visitors to load pages, and offers ways to fix issues if there are any. Core Web Vitals are a set of specific factors that Google considers important in a webpage’s overall user experience.

Components:

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): Measures loading performance. LCP should occur within 2.5 seconds of when the page first starts loading.
• First Input Delay (FID): Measures interactivity. Pages should have an FID of less than 100 milliseconds.
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): Measures visual stability. Pages should maintain a CLS of less than 0.1.

Focus:

These metrics focus on real user experiences, particularly the speed, responsiveness, and visual stability of a page.

Implementation:

Core Web Vitals are integrated into Google's overall ranking algorithm, meaning they directly impact your site's SEO performance.

6.

On-Page SEO Optimization

Why It's Important:

On-page SEO ensures that your website is search-engine friendly, follows the laws, follows the rules, and is accessible to everyone.

Best Practices:

Optimize title tags (meta tags), meta descriptions, and headers. Use descriptive URLs and include keywords. Ensure your content includes internal links to other pages on your site. Every web page needs and H1 Header. Every image needs descriptions. Every page needs to be accessible to every user on the internet (A.D.A Rules) and follow the European Union's and CALOPPA's rules for Data Collection. Luckily, this is one of the places we really shine because we've already built this into our website platform. You have access, and we have access, so there's always help available.



7.

Backlinks and Link Building