Top Rankings are losing ground
So the SEO game seems to be evolving a bit. Over the past few years, content has been king and linking has been vital for rankings. But the idea of ranking is now shifting and the where, why, and how you rank is changing. Pretty soon, keyword ranking as we know it will be obsolete.
This is not something to be alarmed about. It’s actually a good thing. It gives more dimension and dynamic to searching and softens the elitist effect that websites often establish by out-spendig competitor sites.
For instance, dealers love to show up in the top positions of keyword searches such as brand+state or brand+dealer. But these 2-word phrases lack important information that filters in quality site visitors. Brand+state does not tell a search engine what about the brand you want. Do you want a car, a part, service, financing, a dealer, and where in the state do you want this and why? Sure a dealer has all these things but the 2-word phrase does not distinguish this. A brand+dealer phrase does not pinpoint a geo market, thus the search engine at best would filter your results based on the geo proximity of your ISP.
As a result, showing up in the top ranks of these searches brings more lower quality traffic to your site than something like brand+dealership+city which tells a search engine precisely what about the brand you are seeking and more precisely where. The quantity of searches between the two often confuses people because the brand+state and brand+dealer phrases receive significantly more searches than brand+dealership+city. Thus, if you have the capital you can afford to position your site in these less specific keyword markets.
This is all Search 101 but the reason I bring it up is because soon Google will be filtering results for people based on previous searches and sites being visited, information stored on your computer as cookies. Thus a brand+state search will start showing different results for someone that has been searching for parts related to a brand versus someone searching for financing related to the brand. However, you won’t be able to position your site in targeted markets like you can today because your position will be influenced by user variables you do not control.
What this comes down to is that showing up in the top rankings is losing its significance. You will not be able to position your site in specific keyword markets as effectively because the same keyword phrase will have different meanings for everyone searching based on their recent behavior. Thus, the key to driving quality traffic to your site will be more impacted by how effectively you can appear in un-anticipated keyword markets AND offer a sticky experience to these un-anticipated users.
Lots more to come on this subject.
One Dealership of infinite possibilties
Wanted to take advantage of message by Seth Godin in one of his recent blogs. The blog touches on the subject of how Search, or search engines, makes the infinite more finite. It’s a valid point. The masses have come to rely on search engines for helping to initiate or at least narrow down a person’s infinite number of choices. But what does this mean for businesses?
Businesses, Car Dealerships included, can not be everywhere in Search and so you must be selective about where you position your website. If you focus entirely on where your competition is then you are missing out on opportunities to reach market share where you competition is not. By the same token, if you focus solely on where your competition is not then you will miss out on a lot of your market share. Alas, you need a balanced strategy for both.
This is where data and research become important. There is data available and there are tools that are accessible for determining where and how to position your website. For instance, Axandra and Web CEO which are two of the more popular software programs for researching and managing SEO (and to some extent your PPC efforts). There are also good online tools such as Webmaster Toolkit which are good for researching Search Markets too.
Car Dealerships have two choices…they can invest time and training into utilizing these tools effectively, or else they can rely on trusting providers to assist with or even manage these things on their behalf. Regardless, someone needs to be on top of these things in order for dealerships to thrive in today’s online marketplaces. For Dealers that do rely on providers to do this, which is the majority, they still need to be responsible for where and how these providers do position their dealer customer websites.
It’s all about supply and demand and while you do want to position your site where there is an abundance of demand, you also want to position yourself where there is little supply. You can obtain a lot of market share by positioning your site in spaces that are frequented and not saturated with suppliers.
So when it comes to Search Engine Marketing for Car Dealers, remember that you do not need to be everywhere for everyone. You do need however, a well-balanced mixture of visibility within your competitor markets and the market spaces where you can be the bright and shiny star in a galaxy of infinite possibilities.
Shouts out to Andy at Vinart for forwarding the Godin article.
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.
