Most people equate the term Search Engine Optimization to Organic Search however if you think about it SEO could more accurately be described as “optimizing” your website for all forms of Search Marketing, i.e. Organic Search, PPC, Blog/RSS Marketing, and for Social Marketing purposes. In other words, while SEO is indeed a form of SEM, it is not necessarily limited to just Organic Search. SEO could also be considered a form of Search Marketing Optimization, or SMO.

How important is it to get these terms straight? Hard to say, but probably important. For years, car dealers and automotive marketing providers have misused the term Search Engine Marketing as specific to Pay-Per-Click Advertising and the cumulative result has been a complete misuse and application of Search Marketing all together. Because of PPC and 3rd-party automotive sites, dealers today perceive Search Marketing as a lead generator, whereas really there is much more to Search Marketing than just generating leads.

Take brand awareness, for instance, or market positioning, and other forms of Search Engine Visibility. Similar to off-line advertising such as radio, T.V, and print where your objective really is to create awareness of and familiarity with your brand or company throughout targeted physical geo-markets, Search Marketing should really be approached in a similar fashion - as an ongoing and long-term marketing strategy rather than a try-this-try-that lead generation approach. Increased sales is the intended result, but the increase is not always measured on a cost-per basis. It can also be evaluated holistically in regards to the entire dealership operation, not just the Internet or BDC function.

3rd-Party automotive sites such as Autotrader.com, Autobytel.com, Cars.com, Vehix.com, etc. have incidentally created a cut-throat mentality throughout the car dealer community that Internet Marketing is about lead generation and “ups”. Unfortunately, car dealers and auto shoppers suffer as a result. Dealerships are obscured to buyers because the search engines are riddled with 3rd-party automotive sites attempting to produce qualified leads they can sell to dealers. It can be overwhelming for buyers to find car dealer websites unless they consciously set out to locate them. This brings up a whole other concern.

If Internet Marketing is essentially concentrated around visibility to those seeking out specific products, services, and information then what is (or is not) happening with those not intentionally seeking out an automotive consumption interest, or market potentials.

Car dealers embracing Organic Search have a better chance at success when tapping in to these search market “potentials” not dominated by 3rd-party sites. Then, by doing so, as their dealer sites gain credibility with the search engines they can point their Search Marketing efforts towards more competitive areas presently dominated by lead generators. Email marketing, despite its effectiveness, can not accomplish this because by its nature it is a sit-and-wait approach. PPC does not either, because it is too sporadic for cost-effective saturation. Only Organic Search has the capability of saturating relative search markets in a cost-effective residual manner. But with the right balance of all these things, a truly “optimized” Search Marketing strategy can take effect.

Technorati Tags: search engine marketing, search engine optimization, sem, seo, organic search, search marketing, automotive marketing, car dealer marketing, market positioning, AutoTrader.com, Autobytel.com, Cars.com, Vehix.com

With Organic Search Marketing, quality content plays a vital role. In the early days of organic search, companies only needed to focus on meta tags and information to attain visibility on search engines. Today however, while content on the optimized pages are now essential, so too is content elsewhere on the Web.

Most company sites can not be updated on a regular basis, nor should they be as the sites are designed to be showcases of a company’s products and services. Therefore, updating the static content on your site is not a practical means of providing fresh, unique, quality content on a regular basis. Blog software on the other hand is designed for this.

Blog software is nothing more than scaled down CMS software designed for fresh new content to be posted each day in a journal style format, just like you see here in this blog. In your company blog, you can post the same message each day, multiple times a day even, and develop rewarding relationships with search engines by tagging and optimizing your links towards specific search markets.

Fresh, unique, quality content posted daily to your blog optimized and link for specific pages on your site is a sure way to gain trust and credibility with the search engines which ultimately is what establishes marketing positioning for you in the Web. By finding creative ways to do this, you can make a stand in Organic Search Marketing to find new audiences and market niches you may not previously have known to exist.

Technorati Tags: organic search, blog marketing, rss marketing, CMS

Auto shoppers are known to hit the Internet today when beginning their quest to find a vehicle. But with so many thousands of places for them to go, getting lost, confused, or at least overwhelmed is not uncommon. This makes Organic Search Marketing all that more important.

While the advantage that has been gained in recent years by auto shoppers with the Internet age has been the increase in available information and a decrease in the negotiating power of dealers, the prices to pay are too much information and too many hoops to jump, and dealers are paying for it.

15 years ago, dealers competed locally with their counterparts through radio, television, and print ads which covered most consumer markets. These advertisements concentrated on the business and actual specials and would drive customers directly to the showroom. But with the Internet, these consumer markets have been diluted to the Web, so there is less market share off line and more online.

This does not discredit the importance of off line advertising, however the mentality of online automotive marketing today has shifted away from brand awareness and market visibility towards lead generation. This is a terrible misnomer. What ever happened to driving traffic directly to the dealership?

Organic Search Marketing is the giant sleeper for online automotive marketing. Organic search pivots around the idea of brand awareness and market positioning, not lead generation. In the long run, this can be a more fruitful investment because of the residual value it brings. Service providers have become increasingly more aware of this and are now offering modified versions of their PPC-heavy search engine marketing programs, and car dealers are learning to be quite keen on the information they are given and what they do with it.

Technorati Tags: online automotive marketing, PPC, organic search, car dealer marketing, search engine marketing

When it comes to Automotive Search Marketing, one thing service providers often ignore is the fact that the big decision-makers at car dealerships do not spend their time actually engaged in search marketing. They typically occupy their time with helping the dealership close more deals. This can make the process of conveying the importance of search marketing a challenge.

Last week in a presentation meeting with one of my clients, the GM showed up about 15 minutes after our scheduled time and was only partially focused on the gathering. However, he did not miss a beat when he noticed someone standing near the showroom possibly interested in a purchase. “Hold on,” he told us as he quickly captured the attention of one of the floor reps. “Is that a fresh up?” asked the GM.

So how do you capture the minds of these decision makers about something as essential to their business as search marketing? Writing on key phrases such as “automotive seo” and “automotive blog marketing” are sure ways to gain visibility on search engines, but what’s the point if the decision-makers aren’t searching there to notice you?

Search Marketing is not the only business need with this challenge, but it certainly is one of the more challenging. Partly because it is so new and foreign to most dealer principals and GMs and partly because it is so intangible, almost abstract. Performing searches in front of these folks is helpful, but often times they become overwhelmed with concepts and terminologies and lose interest.

To assist with this, we break today’s Organic Search Marketing into a four distinct categories to create a basic sitting room if you will of the faces of organic search. They are…

1. Quality Content
2. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
3. Link Building
4. Search Engine Visibility

Each of these distinctions has a variety of core elements or services behind them that ultimately define what they are and how they benefit dealers, but this is where we begin. Of course, search engine visibility is where we drill in the idea of how Organic Search impacts the bottom line.

Technorati Tags: automotive, automotive industry, automotive marketing, search marketing, organic search, organic search marketing, search engine marketing, search engine optimization, car dealer marketing

There are thousands of people in your market seeking products, services, and information on the Web that are related to what you provide. Organic Search Marketing is a way to make your dealership more visible and accessible to these search markets while at the same time building your brand and attaining more credibility with your audience. This is what separates Organic Search from other forms of marketing as an INVESTMENT, rather than an advertising expense.

A “search market” is a concentration of Internet users seeking specific products, services, or information by entering in select keywords or key phrases into the major search engines (Google, MSN, Yahoo!, etc.). By “organic” we are referring specifically to the 10 listings which appear on each search engine result page (SERP) and not the sponsored, or pay-per-click (PPC), ads that often appear above and to the side of these results. Unlike the expense of PPC advertising where your ads appear instantly from the time you initiate the campaign and only when there is an exact match to the key phrase you purchase, success in Organic Search Marketing takes vision and commitment to achieve, but the results are extremely rewarding.

Technorati Tags: Organic Search, Google, MSN, Yahoo, pay-per-click, PPC

The glory of organic search marketing is in attaining visibility with the search engines, but the end goal should be to position your business in search markets that create profit for you, not just visibility. It is not difficult to appear in search markets that return little or no reward.

With increased search visibility, businesses are able to tap in to search markets that have the potential to generate significant business for their organizations. For car dealers however, the road to attain this positioning can be a painful wait because many dealers want immediate results.

Pay-per-click advertising can ease the pain a bit. PPC gives dealers the opportunity to appear instantly in searches for markets in which they want to be seen and thus generate instant site traffic. But acquisition of sponsored ads does not necessarily equate to marketing positioning. You can purchase PPC ads all day long and get people to click on them, but if Internet users do not see what they are expecting upon arrival, then you are sure to see them bounce.

In marketing, positioning has come to mean the process by which marketers try to create an image or identity in the minds of their target market for its product, brand, or organization. It is the ‘relative competitive comparison’ their product occupies in a given market as perceived by the target market. Reference: Wikipedia.

With Organic Search, this is typically less of an issue. The reason why is because people are not likely to locate you accidentally or randomly because you have worked your way into their radar. Research on key phrases and search patterns must be well thought out and massaged over time, resulting in a more tailored experience for the end user.

Keep this in mind when reaching out to search markets. You want to position your site in markets that will respond to the value of your product, not the commodity. This can be accomplished mentally by appearing in numerous related search markets, e.g. saturation. Organic Search inherently steers you towards this, but you need a persistent vision that is shared by your stake holders. Otherwise, they may want to change course for more immediate return.

Technorati Tags: Pay-per-click advertising, PPC, Organic Search

Organic Search Marketing is the idea of using SEO to exploit organic search markets on the Web for your dealership.

A “search market” is a concentration of Internet users seeking specific products, services, or information by entering in select keywords or key phrases into the major search engines (Google, MSN, Yahoo!, etc.). By “organic” we are referring specifically to the 10 listings which appear on each search engine result page (SERP) and not the sponsored, or pay-per-click (PPC) ads that often appear above and to the side of these results.

Unlike the expense of PPC advertising where your ads appear instantly from the time you initiate the campaign and only when there is an exact match to the key phrase you purchase, success in Organic Search Marketing takes time to achieve. However, the result can produce a much greater return, primarily because Organic Search Marketing is an investment, not an expense.

The things required to produce results in Organic Search, such as optimized web pages with content beneficial to your customers and links from other related sites, have a lasting impact on your business. In fact, Organic Search is one of the few true investment opportunities in automotive marketing and advertising.

There are thousands if not millions of people seeking things on the Web that are related to what you provide. Our job is to help you identify the search markets that make the most sense for your dealership. There is a time and place for PPC advertising, but our focus here is strictly on Organic Search.

Technorati Tags: Google, MSN, Yahoo!, pay-per-click, PPC, Organic Search Marketing, Organic Search

The highest priority for auto dealers of course is to sell and service vehicles. This requires personnel to handle things such as managing and qualifying leads, closing deals, upgrading finance packages, delivering vehicles, maintaining an effective CRM process, and running a service department. All things that are typically done in-house with trained personnel.

But some functions, such as blog marketing, can and should be farmed out to expert professionals.

Since automotive blog marketing is in its infancy, dealers should be outsourcing this part of their business so they can reap the benefits of blog marketing without being required to train, educate, and manage personnel on this complex form of search marketing. Blog marketing requires time and expertise that is a distraction for dealership personnel. The industry knowledge has not yet accumulated and the tools for automotive blogging have not matured yet to make this a feasible internal business function inside the dealership.

With a full-service blog marketing service dealers are able to select a handful of search markets that they can orient their marketing strategy which in time achieves stand-out results with a fixed budget. The residual impact of organic search marketing makes this calculated approach a good investment too. Once the strategy is defined and implemented, the effort is put on auto pilot and the blog marketing provider can oversee it on a daily basis, producing periodic reports for the dealership to analyze and make necessary adjustments.

Technorati Tags: CRM, automotive blog marketing, blog marketing, search marketing, organic search marketing

Producing content for websites and blogs is not a difficult thing to do. Especially since it can be outsourced at a relatively low cost. But while content is king when it comes to Automotive SEO, there is another important element with which to consider…TAGGING.

Tagging in this context is in regards to things such as title tags, alt tags, and keyword tags, or as which appear at the bottom of each entry on this blog, Technorati Tags. But tagging is not limited to just these criteria. Read this article for more fodder about the depths of tagging.

How you tag the information in your blogs plays a vital role in your SEO success. I learned this the hard way recently by re-tagging more than 2 weeks of published content. The end result is that my client’s landing page went from position 11 on Google to being completely disregarded. I suspect that my message to Google was, “I am confused”.

This begs the question of whether or not is is it better to re-optimize and re-tag already published content or to leave it be and just focus on new techniques. I am finding that letting alone what is already indexed is best. Call it the School of Hard Knox.

Anyhow, it’s good to be back in the blogosphere. I have not read more than a small handful of blog entries, newsletters, or articles in more than 2 weeks, nor have I posted any entries to our new blog in more than 2 weeks because we have had to make some shifts in our product offering and marketing strategy. I expect to set sail on our new course early next week and look forward to sharing the new vision.

Technorati Tags: Technorati, SEO, Google

Three articles this past week published by AutoRemarketing are giving seemingly mixed messages.

Oct 18 - Traditional Media More Productive than Online?
Oct 16 - Dealer Web Sites To Take Higher Priority
Oct 11 - Automakers Reaping Results of Investing Online

The first article talks about how some research performed by a company showed that conversion rates for business generated online were lower than the conversion rates of business generated through traditional advertising. But there are some loopholes in the representation of this information.

For one, the research (or maybe just the article referencing the research) is bundling in all forms of traditional advertising against Internet advertising. If you extract radio advertising from the former and replace it with Internet advertising, then theoretically the headline could read, “Traditional Media More Productive than Radio?” There are other loopholes, but the point is that there is some misrepresentation. It should also be noted that a lot more money is invested into traditional media so naturally the outcome should be greater and better.

The previous two articles talk about how and why dealers are investing more into their web presence, and how OEMs are now on a parity with 3rd party automotive sites. If one were to read only the Oct 18 article then one would be inclined to invest more into non-Internet media. And vice-versa for those who read only the Oct 11 and/or Oct 16 article.

Now this brings up an interesting thought. What is the point in presenting this information to car dealers? All it leads to is confusion for car dealers.

This is where new media such as blog marketing becomes relevant. If ARToday were producing podcasts or vidcasts of this stuff with non-bias no-spin dialog about these topics then that would be great, but I don’t think they are which as far as I am concerned suggests they are merely publishing it for the sake of publishing content. Where is the utility?

Maybe that is our duty. To talk about this stuff. Personally, I like original content that is useful, objective, and non-biased. But some of this stuff seems pointed, misleading, and misrepresented. I don’t think it is intentional. Just unoriginal.

Technorati Tags: AutoRemarketing