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.

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

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