Certain types of promotions can be delivered faster and more effectively than using a two or three page microsite, especially limited time promotions like Nissan Delivers or Ford Employee Pricing Plus.  Promoting limited time promotions on the web would be better served using a publishing platform so your marketing collateral could be archived and as new promotions roll out you can add them to the home page of your site.

If you are looking to drive credit leads using landing pages at places squidoo.com will provide free traffic and search engine optimization benefit and the cost is very cheap.  I have a few squidoo lenses delivering daily leads through lead aggregation services and they rank very well for terms related to Tulsa bad credit car loans and Jacksonville buy here pay here car lots.

Because static content can fall out of favor with the search engines you can also use blogs to drive traffic to your main site or lead generation property.  This will allow you to rank for more keywords faster and offer multiple points of entry and dominate localized search terms.  This blog about New Jersey bad credit car loans is ranking for over 500 keywords in less than 60 days and drives an incredible amount of targeted traffic in a geographic area.

Using unbranded dealer micro sites to generate leads for a car dealer does have benefit if you have an outlet to dispose of leads that are not in your market area.  Most dealers do not wish to make this type of investment of time to facilitate this or really understand how it works.  Having model specific microsites that rank nationally really have very little value especially if they are unbranded unless you have a way to dispose of these additional leads.  A car dealer would be better off to have a multi page secondary website that ranks in competitive market areas to drive email leads and phone calls and deliver a branding message.

Before making a huge investment you need to explore all of your options and look for the most cost effective ways to deliver additional leads.   You can have very sticky content created on a regular basis that does not require a dealer to invest in search engine marketing and own the search engine result pages using very evergreen search engine optimization techniques.

If you would like a no cost consultation please give me a call at 912-266-1629

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.

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

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