The main challenge when building links for the car industry?
Its diverse nature: car dealerships, rental companies, manufacturers, parts suppliers, repair shops, and major automotive publications. While they're all fighting for the same results, they all need different strategies.
In this article, I’ll show you the exact SEO strategies we use to build powerful backlinks for automotive businesses. You will learn six battle-tested tactics you can use to boost your automotive SEO efforts and drive traffic to your website.
Let's get into it.
A Look Under the Hood: Our Automotive Link Building in Action
You may be wondering: Why is a SaaS link-building agency writing about automotive backlinks?
The truth is, we've built links across the most competitive niches, including automotive.
With a lot of success, too!
Here's a quick customer story for you: DiscoverCars.com
When DiscoverCars.com, a major player in the car rental space, reached out to us, they had one goal: boost their visibility in Google Search and organic traffic.
Quick to act, our team developed a strategy focused on earning high-authority links tailored to their business model and unique needs.
The result? Over 200 link placements on top-tier travel and lifestyle blogs, including:
Porch.com (DR86)
Buymecoffee.com (DR91)
G2.com (DR91)
This wasn’t a scattergun approach.
We carefully selected high-DR websites people use to plan their holidays to place DiscoverCars in the direct path of potential customers.
And the campaign impact?
A 104% increase in traffic!
Hell, yeah!
6 Battle-Tested Link-Building Tactics For The Automotive Industry
Here are six link-building strategies that we’ve used to drive qualified traffic and boost search rankings for our automotive clients.
1. Secure placements in "best of" listicles
Securing a mention in a niche listicle, like "5 Best Car Rental Services" or "10 Best SUVs for Families in 2025," has always been a good way to get backlinks and position your business along with established competitors.
With the rise of AI search, listicle link-building is even more relevant. AI Overviews and AI assistants like ChatGPT, Claude, or Perplexity, which more and more people are using to research services, like the structured listicle format, and pull information from them.
And getting featured in AI answers is a quicker route to sales than through traditional organic search.
2. Get niche edits in high-traffic automotive content
Niche edits, or editorial links, are one of the most effective ways to leverage existing website authority. The idea is to find popular, ranking content in your niche and get a link inserted naturally.
Editorial.Link specializes in these kinds of insertions. It's a main link acquisition tactic we use to secure placements for our automotive clients, including the ones I shared above.
3. Write guest posts for authoritative automotive blogs
Writing a high-quality article for another reputable automotive website in your niche increases your online visibility, boosts domain authority, and brings referral traffic.
For example, contributing a piece to BookMyGarage.com gets you a DR74 link and places your content in front of 22k readers every month.
4. Build linkable assets that attract links passively
By creating genuinely useful resources — known as linkable assets — you give people a good reason to link to your site.
Consider creating:
- Calculators, for example, car loan payment calculators or fuel cost comparison tools.
- Original data studies: For example, the car search engine iSeeCars.com regularly publishes studies like their "The Best and Worst Car Colors for Resale Value" report. This single piece of content has earned them thousands of over 1k backlinks from 500+ domains.
- Infographics & interactive maps: Turn your original data and industry knowledge into visual guides (e.g., DIY car maintenance tips), maps (fuel consumption across the USA), or charts.
4. Get local links and mentions
For a local business like a car dealership or auto repair shop, local links help appear in 'near me' results. Because they help search engines like Google assess local relevance and trustworthiness.
How do you secure local backlinks?
- Sponsor local events, teams, or charities to get a link from their website.
- Partner with non-competing local businesses. For example, a local tire shop could link back to your auto repair services.
- Get featured in local news outlets for a community event or business milestone.
- List your business in local directories.
- Create local guides and resources, like the most scenic roads in Colorado.
5. Engage with automotive forums and online communities
Skillfully weaving your business and service into forum discussions is also an effective way to boost your visibility — even if it doesn't come with a hyperlink.
For example, when you search for "best place to rent a car in London", a Reddit thread appears in the second place.
Getting Reddit and Quora mentions is also great for AI search visibility because LLMs use user-generated content in their answers a lot.
Automotive Link-Building Best Practices
- Match tactics with your business model. If you're a car dealership or repair shop catering mainly to the local population, your focus should be on local websites and directories. As a nationwide car rental company or an e-commerce business, create linkable assets, get featured in listicles, and go after editorial links. For bloggers and affiliates, guest posts and niche edits will work best.
- Build links to category pages, for example, "medium cars", as opposed to specific models. As the industry evolves and new products appear, it's easier to manage and maintain authority even when products disappear.
- Build relationships. If you're a local business, collaborate with complementary businesses. If you're a blogger or an SEO/agency, cultivate relationships with journalists and other bloggers.
Automotive Link Building FAQ
Not sure how it works? These quick answers will help:
How many backlinks does an automotive website need to rank?
How many links you need for your automotive site to rank depends on the competition.
For highly competitive national keywords, you might need 200+ links just to get to the first page and another 300 to get to the top 3# backlinks.
However, for a local business focusing on local SEO, the target is more manageable: aim for 30-70 locally-relevant domains pointing to your main service pages.
What anchor text mix is safe for automotive topics?
There's no fixed ratio of anchor types you should aim for as long as your backlink profile is diverse. So a mix of branded anchors (e.g., "Your Dealership Name"), naked URLs, partial-match keywords (e.g., "best used cars in Bristol"), and generic terms ("click here").
Focusing on one type of anchor text, for example, exact-match ones, can trigger spam signals.
How many links do small automotive sites typically need?
For a small dealership or auto service provider, quality beats quantity.
Focus on securing 50-100 relevant, high-quality referring domains for your homepage and 30-70 for your key product or service pages.
A slow and steady pace of 2-3 new quality backlinks per month is a great long-term strategy.
For multi-location brands, should you build links to the homepage or location pages?
For local SEO, always prioritize building links directly to your individual location pages because it reinforces local relevance for each specific dealership or service center. Local relevance beats the domain authority score and increases rankings for 'near me' searches.
To redistribute the link equity across pages, use internal linking.
Final Words
To succeed in link building for automotive businesses, you need to choose the right strategy for your business.
Target pages that will get your product in front of your customers wherever they are — in local search results, travel blogs, and industry publications.
Your competitors are already racing ahead, so it's time to hit the gas!
Contact Editorial.Link to secure backlinks from reputable sites that will increase your online presence. And leave your competitors in the dust!
