In today’s competitive search engine marketing race, few select companies have effectively positioned themselves in the search markets for “automotive seo“. But what does this mean for their dealers?

Search engine optimization is a fascinating science that has evolved recently to being influenced by two particular techniques…

1. Content
2. Linking

Content is primal because search engines have become more sensitive towards how keywords and phrases are applied. While the search engines themselves do not discern the quality of meaning in content, there are certain guidelines towards which content should be written in order to best establish trust and rapport with these search robots.

Linking is key because it shows search engines that others are taking interest in your information. This is difficult to accomplish considering all the information available. Additionally, there are detrimental conflicts with link building if not carried out mindfully.

Meta tags, phrases, and page titles are not a bad thing, but they certainly are not the be=all-end-all in search marketing. Today’s automotive SEO requires fresh, unique, and relevant quality content which few companies can provide.

Technorati Tags: automotive seo

When you stop a PPC campaign, you instantly stop appearing in search result listings. You could spend $3,000 a month for 9 months only to have everything come to a screeching halt the minute you pull the plug.

With organic search however, you could pull all the SEO off your site and bring an end to all SEO efforts and still appear in search results for a period of time.

This, in a nutshell, is the benefit of residual search.

With PPC, there is absolutely no residual search benefit. With organic search there is. This doesn’t make PPC any worse than organic, but things like this must be considered when investing your marketing dollars into search engine marketing. There is a time and a place for PPC, but there is also a tremendous need and value in organic search.

There seems to a growing awareness that search engine optimization (SEO) in the auto industry has fallen to the wayside in recent years to pay-per-click advertising, or PPC. In fact, when people talk about “search engine marketing” these days often times what they actually are referring to is pay-per-click advertising. But there is more to SEM than just PPC and the few companies that have been or are beginning to provide quality SEO services for their dealers are in for a real treat, and the reason why has to do with RSS marketing.

Unlike PPC which does not depend on quality SEO, RSS marketing revolves around it so before you can even think of getting in to RSS marketing, you first must have a solid SEO foundation which, for effective search marketing today comes down to two primary things:

1. Relevancy of content
2. Good SEO practices

Relevancy of Content
While the word “content” is a generic term, the context by which it is used in SEM has to do primarily with static text on a web page that search engines can read and index. Relevancy is the term used to identify the consistency by which your content is with your business, your product, your services, and other content on your sites. Thus, “relevant content” simply indicates that the information on your sites is consistent with your message or theme and that search engines can identify this.

Good SEO Practices
Search Engine Optimization (Automotive SEO) is the practice of preparing your site for indexing with search engines. This includes things like publishing relevant content, using relevant titles for your pages, applying relevant META information in your page headers, being smart about how you name your image files, and more. Search engines routinely inspect all the pages of your website, looking for these things and updating its databases of websites and information. When users perform a search on the Internet, the search engine wants to present the most popular, relevant, and up-to-date sites and pages it knows of. By optimizing your site properly, you increase the chances of appearing in the top SERPs, or search engine results pages.

RSS Marketing vs. PPC
Once you have established these things on your sites, RSS marketing can then be applied to help produce long-term, or residual, results with a far better ROI than PPC. RSS Marketing consists of using XML syndication services to make your relevant content available to a myriad of other sources and destinations on the Web, including search engines. This makes your content, thus your message, visible to more than just those searching for it on a search engine that happen to notice your paid ad.

Residual Benefit
Keep in mind that with PPC, the more people click on your ads, the more it costs you and the more you drive up the price of PPC tomorrow, so you are fueling a vicious cycle of expense that only lines the pockets of our famed search engines. With RSS Marketing, however, your content will appear not only in the organic listings of a single search engine, but also in hundreds if not thousands of other search engines, directories, news feeds, and more within hours. Additionally, other Internet users can link to your content which adds an entirely new dimension to RSS Marketing. Each time someone clicks on a link to your content, search engines ooze with joy because they know people are interested in your message. Thus, your popularity comes back to you exponentially and at NO ADDITIONAL COST.

If you are doing well in the SEO aspect of your SEM, whether you are a dealer or a service provider, then the time is ripe for you to incorporate RSS marketing into your game.

Technorati Tags: SEO, Automotive SEO

Blogging is a lot of work. Anyone running a blog already knows this, or will come to know this very soon. In addition to producing content on a regular basis that keeps the interest of your readers, you also have to develop a relationship with search engines. This requires much research, persistence, guidance, observation, trial and error and creativity. Hardly the sort of things on which dealers should be spending their time.

But blogging is an important part of today’s business and dealerships are no exception. Dealers need blog marketing too.

There are two primary approaches to blog marketing.

1. Relational Marketing
2. RSS Marketing

Relational Marketing is the idea of using a blog to engage with your customers and build real relationships. RSS Marketing is essentially using content relevancy and Atom or RSS feeds to build trust with the search engines to create search visibility of your dealership’s web presence and drive traffic to your site(s). It is a technique that has been around for years and leveraged by many other industries.

So how does a dealer execute an effective blog marketing strategy without wasting valuable resources?

Much like lot management, dealers have a choice. They can do it in-house or they can outsource it. But unlike lot management, there are not many choices for outsourcing a blog marketing strategy. This will change as ad agencies learn to incorporate blog marketing strategies into their service but right now dealers have few places to go for this sort of thing.

The cost for having a blog sitting on a server is not the expensive part of running a blog. Blogs are free. That’s right, FREE. Anyone can, including businesses can start their own blog simply by going to places like Wordpress.com or Blogspot.com. Even if you choose a paid hosting provider, your cost literally is dollars a month. So how come every business doesn’t have a blog by now?

The reason is that because producing content, keeping the blog optimized, monetized, and tied in with your other marketing and CRM efforts is challenging, requires commitment, and can be a waste of time and money if not executed effectively.

This is where dealers need assistance…blog marketing.

Blog marketing is the practice of utilizing a specific software platform, called CMS for content management system, for publishing content on a regular basis for at least one or more of the many benefits which blog marketing produces. CMS software is typically free to and you don’t even need your own server to run it because there are companies that offer this for free also.

If you are being charged to have a blog that you manage and maintain then you are being ripped off. Do not pay a dime to anyone charging you for this.

However, if you have a blog that requires little or no action on your part, what we call full-service blogs, then this is a different story. Full-service blogs, like AutoBurst, are blogs from which you benefit but that are managed and maintained by another company. Depending on the blog marketing strategy you may or may not be required to participate occasionally with the direction of the blog, but ideally a full-service blog is one in which you reap the rewards of increased search visibility and traffic to your site.

When performing searches on the Web through the major search engines, these engines strive to present you with links to sites and pages with content relevant to the keywords and phrases you enter. While fresh content is important to the engines, so too is relevancy and popularity.

Content that has been around for a while and that is enjoyed by many people on a regular basis through time has more precedence to the search engines than content that has been recently published and viewed only by a small number of people.

This is the essence of residual search marketing.

Granted it is not realistic to keep a single piece of content visible and popular through long periods of time, especially in competitive search markets, your goal should be to build trust with the major search engines by focusing on the same topic each day over long periods of time. By doing so, the engines recognize your blog as a valid and trusted source for this particular information and therefore present it to users searching for what you publish.

Additionally, each time someone clicks on your listings in the SERPs, this tells the search engine that the content had initial value. By displaying links on your landing pages to more related content, these users are likely to click on them which tells the search engine that your content was relevant and useful which in turn gives that listing even more credibility. Unlike PPC where each click incurs a financial transaction, each click on your organic listing increases its value and thus maximizes your ROI.

Came across an informative video about optimizing PPC ads. The video was produced by Traffick.com and featured Mona Elesseily who just released her book on Mastering Panama which is a how-to guide on Yahoo! search marketing. The video is just more than 7 minutes in length but I have extracted the main talking points and am posting them here for your reference.

I would like to note that despite this message being classified as constructive insight for PPC ads, I see no reason why a lot of what is discussed can not be applied to content for your blogs. Our approach to Blog/RSS Marketing is to treat posts as ads, thus the content you post on your blog should be written in a way that not only the search engines like, but also that compels your audience. So often blog copy is used for dialog and while this is not a bad thing, blog copy should also be used for soft persuasion purposes too. I wrote about this many months ago talking about using blogs for the soft sell.

Anyhow, here are the main talking points but be sure to watch the video, as well.

• Differentiate your ads
• Understand your unique selling propositions (USP)
• Create compelling ad copy
  • cater ads to different buyer needs
  • strong customer service
  • official site

• Test your ad copy
  • create at least 2 or 3 test ads
  • build on what works
  • discard what does not work

• Optimize for conversion rates, not just click-through ratio (CTR)
• Optimize for Yahoo! and Google
  • observe different response rates
  • tailor ads to specific engines
  • test, tweak, refine

RSS Marketing is an unfamiliar term in automotive, but that is likely to change as the awareness towards good SEO becomes increasingly more apparent to auto dealers…and competitive.

SEO, or search engine optimization, fell to the wayside a few years ago to PPC, or pay-per-click advertising which was introduced by Google AdSense and AdWords. Automotive companies quickly began offering PPC services and some companies even introduced self-managed or dynamically driven PPC systems that required little or no oversight by dealers. But search marketing has shifted this past year back towards SEO, and the rules have changed.

Conventional SEO was about meta tags and search engine registration. Dealers could pay companies like Real Traffic Productions to perform SEO services to their sites and keep their sites well indexed with the search engines, but with the evolution of blogs and RSS, SEO strategies have evolved. Today’s SEO effectiveness stems from content relevancy and linking, two labor-intensive activities that are not only outside the scope for auto dealers but also difficult for advertising agencies to pull off because the profit margins are too low for such technically laborious work.

Welcome RSS Marketing, which is a technique designed around the practice of blogging for business. RSS, which stands for “really simple syndication” makes it possible for people to publish content on the Web and make it available to anyone with an RSS reader. Essentially, RSS is content broadcasting just like radio and television are audio/video broadcastings.

One way to broadcast an RSS feed is with a blog. The blog would be the network station broadcasting the feed (signal) and an RSS reader would transmit the data into a viewable format just like radios and televisions do. RSS feeds are inherent with all blog software which is not much more than a scaled down content management system, or CMS, that easily installs on most web servers. What this means for dealers is that with they can publish content via RSS and make it available to their consumer audiences instantly and easily.

While some people still equate blogs to being merely online journals, blogs are much more than this, especially when leveraged for business purposes. Auto dealers are beginning to realize this and SEO companies are beginning to offer products and services that leverage these technologies. RSS marketing is simply a means for driving website traffic to a well-optimized website by publishing content that is relevant and useful to search engines and Internet users.

Maybe it’s because I am smack in the middle of it all but there definitely appears to be a buzz about Automotive SEO right now. There is a growing handful of companies providing innovative SEO services, and dealers are beginning to realize that the PPC bandwagon is disbanding. But let’s not make this an opinion column. SEO is serious business and we must consider the facts.

Fact #1
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It is a form of SEM which stands for Search Engine Marketing. PPC is a form of SEM.

Fact #2
SEM is O-U-T. The new term is Search Marketing. Anyone still using the term SEM is out.

Fact #3
SEO is I-N. A few years ago SEO made some noise but today it is surpassing the PPC.

Ok well maybe these aren’t all facts, but you must admit, SEO is IN. Everywhere I look now, companies are turning towards SEO as a core product/service.

So what’s next? 18 months from now when dealers and providers have all mastered the science and art of SEO, how will we drive traffic to our sites then? Will we even have sites or will we all be in Second Life? How does search marketing even work in SL?

Ha I am just having fun. It’s my birthday actually so it’s all good.

Anyhow, the idea of search marketing is no different from that of the Yellow Pages except that it is web-based and organic in the sense that SEM is more elusive than simply paying for a spot on a page in a book. Some form of search marketing will exist tomorrow, but how it will work we are yet to learn?

I think that tomorrow’s SEO will come down to well-balanced mixture of these ingredients:

• Standard SEO
• RSS Marketing
• Link Building
• Social Marketing

Start applying these things to your SEO strategy today and see what happens, especially with RSS Marketing which adds a whole other element to your search marketing efforts. I am prepared to explore link building and social marketing, but RSS Marketing coupled with Standard SEO is plenty in and of itself for the time being.

Technorati Tags: Automotive SEO, PPC, RSS Marketing, Social Marketing, SEO

The formula behind AutoBurst is simple:

1. Provide full-service blogs designed to drive traffic directly to your site(s) with…
2. Quality relevant content written specifically to build credibility with search bots so that…
3. Syndicated content channels built to saturate specific search markets and…
4. Effective SEO measures and conversion techniques on your site(s) can make for…
5. A solid foundation for social marketing and advertising.

The last point is key, “a solid foundation for social marketing.” While Blog/RSS Marketing can organically drive traffic to your site, social marketing can give dealers exposure in areas presently not being targeted. This concept falls in line with the article titled, “The hidden marketplaces of online auto shoppers”, in a previous newsletter. If you have not read that then you may want to check it out.

These are the underlying principals behind AutoBurst that when applied individually will have some benefit, but when applied collectively can have a tremendously fruitful and innovative result. These concepts are not particularly new as far as Internet marketing goes, but they certainly are not being applied in automotive marketing.

Please visit our new AutoBurst promo page to learn more about this new and exciting solution for dealers.

Technorati Tags: SEO, social marketing