Archive for search engine optimization
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.
Dealer Micro Sites – What is Your Purpose
Posted by: | CommentsDealer micro sites can be a great marketing tool if deployed properly. They can bring additional traffic to your website and more customers to your showroom. There are some caveats they may actually cause you more harm than good if you launch dealer micro sites in a haphazard fashion.
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
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