Puttin’ on the Ritz: Luxury Appeals to Customers
If you’ve stepped into one of your local automotive dealerships in the last couple of years, you may have noticed a change. Many dealers of luxury brands are making improvements to their showrooms to make them more attractive and appealing to their customers. If you didn’t know any better, you probably couldn’t tell the difference between the dealer’s facility and a five-star hotel.
That’s because customers enjoy luxury and style. And when they step into a place that’s all decked out, it instills a sense of confidence in the facility and the people who work there.
You can do the same thing with your online brand marketing campaigns. The more stylish your website is, the more attractive it will be to potential customers. Nobody has confidence in a company that has an amateurish website, especially in today’s world where visitors judge your company by its online presence. Here are a few suggestions for making your company’s website more professional and attractive to new and existing clients:
• Break the information up into smaller, easier-to-read chunks. Nothing turns off a webpage visitor faster than seeing a huge block of information with no spaces or breaks.
• Make your website easy to navigate. Visitors don’t want to guess about where clicks will take them. Label the links efficiently to take the guesswork out of navigating through your webpage.
• Put the most important information first. Internet users have dozens of options to get their information. Don’t make them search for it on your website or they’ll just go to a website where it’s easier to find the information they want.
• Write with search engines in mind. This is very important, because if you don’t catch the attention of the web spiders, people doing general searches won’t notice your website. Consider SEO tactics and other tools that ensure a high ranking for places like Google and Yahoo.
With these tips, you can make your company’s website the cyberspace equivalent of a luxury dealership. Cater to your clients by making everything attractive to keep them coming back for more and telling their friends about your website as well.
Search Engine Optimization: Ten Years Later
If you’ve done any work at all with SEO, you might’ve wondered about the history of the concept and some of the changes it’s made since it began. I know I’ve wondered about that several times. Here is an article that explains some of the big changes in the last decade, but I’ve pulled out some of the highlights for quick reference.
• Minor changes in the SEO market have taken place over the years, and they often escape the notice of those in the industry. Taken as a whole, howver, they constitute major changes between today’s techniques and those from ten years ago.
• In the year 2000, Google had just over one billion pages indexed. Today, there are about 10 billion pages indexed. Of course, that figure is ever-growing. The only way the article writer could find the number of pages was to type “the” into the search box and see how many results came back.
• There is now about ten times more competition in the search engine optimization industry than there was in the year 2000.
• Search engines still look for things like keywords, key phrases, body text, title tags and frequency when indexing pages. The article writer suggests not wasting time on meta keyword tags, though, as they are of less importance today than they were years ago.
• Submitting your URL to a search engine is no longer necessary, as the spiders take care of that for you.
• Yahoo and Google are generally the two accepted search engines today, whereas there were several more popular and widely-used ones ten years ago, including Infoseek, WebCrawler, Excite and Lycos, among others.
Luckily, the fundamentals of SEO are still a major part of online marketing and other Internet-based industries. We’ll continue to see changes in the near future, but the basic concept will likely remain the same.
Just Say No to Floating Ads
If you’re like me, those floating ads that appear on some of the websites you visit get on your nerves. You may not have seen them because there are only a few websites on which they occur. If that’s the case, consider yourself lucky. More than once I’ve tried to click on the “Close” option and accidentally opened the ad completely.
I’m mentioning this because Google was reportedly about to introduce these annoyances on some of its pages. A representative from Google Adsense, however, squashed this rumor a few days ago. He also added that this would “never happen” because it violates the search engine’s advertising policies.
In addition to that, though, some users who have implemented floating ads into their adsense codes have had their accounts deleted lately. Google has also reduced the clickable area around the advertisements it places on pages in an effort to more accurately monitor what consumers are purchasing. Up until now, there have been a large number of erroneous clicks that only throw the statistics off.
These actions are indicative of Google’s ambition to become the single engine that Internet users go to whenever they search online. Because Google is creating more user-friendly websites and unintrusive advertisements on its pages, searchers feel less bombarded by companies trying to push their wares and more comfortable searching for anything they need.
What does this mean for the online marketing industry? It means that more people will see your pages with fewer frustrating advertisements. In the long run, it could mean more visitors and more profits. Who doesn’t like that?
Three Ways to Drive Dealership Business with Your Blog
There are several ways you can increase the number of customers that visit your dealership. But any marketing professional will tell you that word-of-mouth is one of the most effective means of advertising. The Internet and online marketing have taken that concept to an entirely new level, though. Here are some ways that you can create an effective blog for your dealership and attract more customers by virtual word-of-mouth.
Show Testimonials on Your Blog
This is the 21st century’s version of telling your friends and family about your great experience as a customer. Ask your satisfied customers to write positive reflections of their experiences and grant you permission to post them online. Some companies even have pre-printed testimonials and ask customers to sign them if they agree with what they say.
Add Content Frequently
In terms of search engine recognition and the greatest chance for exposure, content with specific keywords relevant to your dealership is ideal for advertising your company. Google and Yahoo are more likely to pick up on original and fresh content that is updated frequently. And by frequently, I mean at least five times a week, but ideally every day or even more often than that.
Allow Subscriptions and Feeds
These two simple additions to your dealership’s blog ensure that your customers have easy access to the website without needing to remember the URL. With subscriptions, the customers who have subscribed to your blog receive an e-mail each time you update the blog. Feeds are slightly different, but they essentially work along the same concept.
Come back next week for more tips on how to make your dealership blog work for you.
Three More Steps for Achieving Social Media Success
There are so many steps and possibilities for achieving social media success that it’s hard to narrow them down to just one or two blog posts. Following is the second installment of three more tips to help you be successful in the ever-important world of social media networking and online marketing.
Digg in
Digg is one of the best ways to get your website and online company noticed. That’s why it’s so important to build relationships with the people using the Digg network. Usually, the users have their information listed on their pages, even their instant messaging screen names. Try to create relationships by contacting a few of these people each week to add to your network. By investing just a few minutes each day, you will spread your networking efforts over many social media websites .
Use Google’s many services
Have you ever thought about making a video relating to your company or services? With the popularity of YouTube, this could be a huge advantage in helping you reach your goals. Post your video and then build links to it through the other networking that you’re doing. It might be time-consuming at first, but the benefits will definitely be worth it.
Go global
It’s great to have your company’s message all over the World Wide Web in English. But you’d be surprised how much better you can network by posting the same message in different languages. With simple online translators like this one, you can make your content available in several different languages and then submit it to a broader range of networking sites. It only takes a few extra minutes, but it pays off very well for your networking goals.
Yahoo and Google the Odd Couple of Search
Optimizing your site for one search engine doesn’t necessarily mean it’s also optimized for others. But in the world of online marketing, optimizing is vital for getting your auto dealership recognized. Unfortunately, your site could be ranked high with Google but much lower with Yahoo. That’s because each search engine is different, typically looking for different things when ranking sites. Following are some differences and similarities to consider to ensure that both major search engines rank your website as high as possible.
Inbound Linking
With Google, inbound links are the bread and butter of your website. The more websites that link to your website, the higher your website ranks. But there’s more to it than that. The Google spiders look at each website’s Page Rank, too. If you have many inbound links from high-ranking pages, your rank also increases.
Keyword URL
Yahoo places greater emphasis on your website’s URL than Google does. To achieve a higher Yahoo ranking, make sure your keyword phrase appears in your URL. If it doesn’t, make a new page or add a keyword-relevant URL as a new page from your website’s front page. Google also looks for this, but only when other websites link to your page by using strictly the website’s address.
Keyword Density
In addition to using your keyword in the website’s URL, it’s also important to have keywords scattered strategically through a site. The ideal amount of keywords is between 6 and 8 percent. Anything over 8 percent could adversely affect your website’s rank.
Link Building
This is similar to the idea of inbound links that Google focuses on, but it goes a step further by encouraging website owners to build linking relationships with other sites. Ask others to link to your site if you link to theirs. Or you can even offer something free to those who link to your site, such as a complimentary web tool or download. Google spiders like to see this, and it radically improves your chances of getting ranked higher.
Site Maps
Site maps used on your site make the spiders’ jobs much easier, allowing them to quickly search your page. Be sure to keep the maps updated so they continue to offer the latest information to searchers.
It’s extremely difficult to know exactly how the Google and Yahoo ranking systems work, as the algorithms and other procedures are confusing and ever-changing. Following the tips above, however, has increased many website rankings, and these are still the most basic ways to get your website noticed.
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