SEO for Auctioneers: An Introduction
Learn all about SEO for auctioneers, from its benefits to functionality to optimizations, in this mini-guide based on hundreds of hours of experience serving auction houses.
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insights from 149,000+ hours of professional services marketing experience
SEO for auctioneers is the work of making your auction company and upcoming sales easy to find when bidders and sellers search Google, Google Maps, and AI answers like Google AI Overviews and ChatGPT.
Your goal is to make a profit at each event, and that starts with attracting qualified buyers to every auction. Part of nurturing the relationship with your buyers is keeping them updated and informed.
To forge and maintain those relationships, you need an online presence. And if you want to reach as many potential buyers as possible, you should have a plan for SEO.
Keep reading to learn more, and give us a call at 888-601-5359 or contact us online to start generating leads and revenue with professional SEO management services!
What is SEO for auctioneers?
SEO for auctioneers is the process of increasing your visibility in online search engines like Google. Mastering the best practices that play into a successful SEO campaign allows you to become more visible in search engines, which will bring more people to your website and — hopefully — your auctions.
When people search for auctioneers in your city, you want them to find you.
Landing and maintaining a spot on the first page of Google search results, or a citation in Google AI Overviews, can help, and it’s a primary goal of working in SEO.
Why is SEO for auctioneers important?
SEO is especially important for auctioneers because your business is based on drawing as many people to each auction as possible.
Since SEO helps make you more visible online, your potential customers will be able to find you more easily. And, if your SEO is effective, it will encourage potential clients to take the next step and attend your events.
On-page SEO for auctioneers
Every page of your auctioneer website serves as an opportunity to engage in effective SEO. You can optimize each page with on-page elements like:
- Keyword and branded title tags
- Keyword-rich headings
- Unique and knowledgeable page content
- Proper tags for visuals like graphics or video
Off-page SEO for auctioneers
There are lots of opportunities to use SEO off your website, too. If your online visibility is good enough and you’re working hard, people can more naturally find you as outside sources link to your website. Typically, off-page SEO includes:
- Creating quality content that attracts links
- Submitting an XML sitemap to Google and Bing
- Social media marketing
- Outreach, pitches, and other ways to receive links
Local SEO for auctioneers
SEO for auctioneers starts with a local plan. You want to get people to come to your auctions, and those people are going to be nearby.
An SEO plan that focuses on a specific town, city, or region will target your audience, so you can appeal to the people in your area.
You can set up a Google Business Profile to start with your local SEO, and keeping your business name, address, and hours identical on it and your website helps Google and AI assistants trust those details.
You should also have your name, address, and phone number on your website, so customers can find you quickly and easily at any time.
There are more tactics you can use to get more local attention for your business, but these will lay the foundation for your local appeal.
Create relevant, shareable content
People interested in your business also want to hear what you have to say. That means starting a blog, writing informative articles, and creating new pages based on questions you frequently hear from prospective buyers at your auctions.
Your content can include a huge range of possibilities, like laws that apply to auctions, financial concerns with auctions, how auctions work, the most common kinds of auctions, and more.
You can even throw in some information about charity auctions, which are becoming popular events for non-profits, and other special events that inform your customers.
It’s best to post new blogs on a schedule so both search engines and your readers know when to expect new content.
Your goal should be to inform your readers and bring something new to the conversation, essentially creating quality content with every post.
Know your keywords
Using the same terminology as your customers (keywords) and the full questions they ask AI assistants is an essential part of an SEO strategy.
If you rank well or get cited in AI answers for the terms people use to find an auctioneer, you’re bringing in more business.
You can research keywords with a few quick steps:
- Create a list of buzzwords in your industry
- Look at your competition and see what keywords they use
- Copy and paste the words into Google Ads Keyword Planner
- Use the keywords that are most relevant and valuable to your business on your website
Using these keywords on your pages will help you show up in search engine results pages (SERPs) and encourage potential customers to visit your website. Without these keywords, you might as well not have a website at all!
For the questions people ask AI assistants, such as which auction companies near them handle estate sales, OmniSEO®, WebFX’s AI search visibility platform, shows the prompts you already show up for and which competitors are cited beside you.
Use those gaps to decide which questions your pages answer next.
Join business associations
Join your local Chamber of Commerce and business association and ask if you can have your auction’s contact information listed. Their websites usually rank well, so linking your name to theirs will positively impact your online visibility as well.
Give every auction its own page
Every upcoming auction needs its own page on your website, because a dedicated page per sale is what Google’s event listings and AI answers can find, read, and send bidders to.
That page should answer what bidders ask before they register: what’s selling, when and where the sale happens, and how to bid.
- Put the essentials first. Open with the sale date, location, preview times, and whether bidding is live, online, or both, then add highlight lots with photos.
- Add Event structured data. Google’s documentation says Event markup makes your sales eligible for the event experience on Google, with your logo and a description of the event.
- Update the status when plans change. Use the schema.org eventStatus property to mark a sale as postponed, rescheduled, or canceled, so bidders don’t drive to a sale that isn’t happening.
- Decide what happens after the sale. Keep a past auction’s page live when its prices realized still show sellers what their items could bring. If you delete a page with nothing to replace it, Google says the old URL should return a 404 or 410 error.
Get professional help with auctioneer SEO
If you’re too busy with events and organization to worry about SEO, WebFX can take care of it for you. Our team prioritizes SEO work by what brings in registered bidders and new consignments, not by how many issues a tool flags. We keep up with changes like Google AI Overviews and AI assistants, so your auctions stay visible wherever people search.
With RevenueCloudFX, WebFX’s platform for measuring how marketing drives revenue, we track the calls and form submissions your site earns by channel, so you can see which pages bring in business.
WebFX SEO plans start at $2,900 / month. Contact us today to start planning your SEO strategy.
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