Archive for automotive search engine marketing
Automotive SEO Mistakes
Posted by: | CommentsAutomotive SEO is not rocket science. It entails just three elements that if worked in conjunction with each other properly you can own your market area. I am a firm believer that the current dealer website model is flawed and dealers need to look beyond having just one piece of online real estate or have multiple mediums to attract buyers, but I digress…
One of the biggest mistakes I have seen is how automotive SEOs market themselves. As so elegantly stated by Chip at www.dealerrater.com
“The best non-dealer SEO’s that I know of, don’t even have websites; referrals and results drive their business.” at Dealerrefresh.com
You do not use client success stories as part of your marketing pitch in an open setting especially if it identifies the keywords you are targeting for them. This does two things:
- Competing with the client for the click – Potentially the SEO’s marketing material can compete directly with the clients and siphon traffic from them. This could also potentially alienate the average consumer and cause them to look for a different company to spend their money with. Customers hate marketing for the most part and telling them how you captured their click because of an aggressive online marketing campaign is just bad form.
- Inviting Competition - This can happen in many forms from other SEOs and/or affiliate marketers. An aggressive SEO could create multiple affiliate properties around the keywords you flaunt and steal your clients traffic and increase their cost. Because most automotive search terms are localized it is not a formidable task. This will force the automotive seo practictioner to lose their effectivness in that market area and either seek out the other site owner for links or the client does that and has to spend even more money or change providers.
Be a total control dominator in your local search markets
Posted by: | CommentsGoogle.com is making some serious changes to its search engine results and one would think that search engine marketing and pay per click advertising would be a way to help deliver more traffic to a dealerships website once these changes are fully realized.
Some are even claiming that the changes they are implementing will even be the death of search engine optimization as we know it. This is true to an extent. What these changes will accomplish is create a need to have more than one website as a marketing property to reach buyers at different points in the buying funnel in your marketing area.
In addition to their main website they will need additional properties to have total control of the search engines to become a dominator in their marketing areas. If executed properly dealers will be able to compete with manufactures sites for product searches. As a test I was able to win some great search terms that are generating national traffic and very localized traffic for automotive terms buyers use, generating 5-7 leads a day with around 20 clicks a day to ebay.com. Granted this site is not used for a dealer, it is geared to affiliate conversions and not much effort has been put into it. You can contact me direct to get more info. A good affiliate marketer does not give away his niches and I have given away to much now.
Even if not full developed dealers should own as many variations of their products with regional descriptions. IE:
- citybranddealer.com city-brand-dealer.com
- citymodeldealer.com city-model-dealer.com
- dealernamemarketareadealer.com dealername-market area-dealer.com
You could use these domains to create landing pages, blogs, product brochures and use them to provide others search benefits to your main website and drive traffic.
This coupled with maximizing local listings in the major search engines will provide more traffic than any PPC campaign can and attract targeted traffic if the additional assets are optimized for the correct point in the buying cycle.
The algorithmic changes that Google is making will not have near the impact on automotive SEO as it will on broader niches. Personalized search for consumers will not disrupt the search engine results pages nowhere near as much as it would other sites competing for consumers clicks.
Consumers do not perform searches for car information anywhere near as much as the general web public search for other terms. Let’s face it people only look for car information when they are close to making a decision on purchasing one, about every three years. Personalized search will not even come into play in the automotive industry, for marketing purposes. Where as localized search results will.
Additional web assets with correct local search engine local directory listings will be the big winner for car dealers in their search engine marketing efforts. Still placing search engine optimization heads above PPC advertising and search engine marketing.
Dealer.com Challenge – SEO vs Search Engine Marketing
Posted by: | CommentsSearch engine marketing is a great way to generate immediate traffic. What is often overlooked by by car dealers is the real value of a well optimized site and an aggressive SEO campaign. A recent post I did about dealership web traffic I referenced another post from Dealer.com on Drivingsales.com and feel that it was misconstrued based on the replies by Dealer.com.
Pay Per Click advertising has it’s place like for special promotions or a fresh site. However at the end of the day there are so many studies out there that show that SEO provides better value than Seach Engine Marketing or PPC. One of the best explanations was from Hubspot.com.
Their simple study showed that ranking number nine generates the same amout of leads and traffic as the number two paid listing.
From the post at Hubspot:
Here are the key takeaways from the data and the images above:
1) Organic results get 75%+ of the attention. People don’t click on the ads nearly as much as the organic results.
2) The first organic result gets over 25% of all clicks. Within the organic results, the first result gets the most clicks by far – more than double the second result.
3) Within the ads, the first ad also gets the most clicks. But, since you pay per click for the ads, you should care less about volume and more about if the traffic will actually convert and what your cost per lead and cost per sale will be.
4) There are a good number of clicks on all top 10 organic results. Even the last result gets about 3% of people to click on it – this is about the same rate as the second pay per click ad, and unlike the ad, its free!
SEO wins day in and day out. Search engine marketing is an expensive way to drive traffic. Contrary to popular belief SEO can be almost instant and that is the real purpose of this post to show how fast I can get it to rank for certain terms. I bet it will be faster than the time it takes to set up a pay per click campaign. Should see results in minutes not in ages, the term used to denigrate SEO. I took it as a challenge from Dealer.com
I’ll report back with results.
- Published at : 12:45 pm Decemember 12, 2008
- Ranking #1 for : “Dealer.com Challenge – SEO vs Search Engine Marketing” 2:00 pm 12/12/08 < low value but indexed.
- Ranking Number #6 for “dealer.com seo vs search engine marketing” 3:45 pm 12/12/08
- Ranking #1 for “Dealer.com Search Engine Marketing” 7:00 pm 12/12/08
- # 3 for dealer.com search marketing 8:00 pm 12/12/08
- # 3 for dealer.com seo 8:00pm 12/12/08
- #1 & #2 for dealer.com seo vs search engine marketing 10 am 12/13/08
- #1 & #2 for dealer.com search engine marketing vs seo 10 am 12/13/08
- #1 for dealer.com seo 12/14/08
- #1 for dealer.com search engine marketing 12/14/08
- #1 for dealer.com search marketing 12/14/08
- Going to stop tracking results now, and this page may fall out of favor, it was just a test to see how fast it would be to win search terms and show that it is not an ages long process.
images from Hubspot and MarketingSherpa
Recent post at www.drivingsales.com/blog