Silver bullets and car sales
Marketing on the Web has taken a hard turn recently towards video and in 2009 video marketing may be all the rave. But will video marketing be just another trend that phases or at least balances out in 2-3 years? Chances are YES, it will.
From 2003 to about 2006, pay-per-click advertising, particularly in the auto industry, took the field by storm. Car dealers were practically forced to spend thousands upon thousands on PPC advertising to stay in the game. Website technology evolved into a death trap for car dealers because the SEO aspect of car dealer websites was completely disregarded. As a result, when the PPC bubble deflated, car dealers were left with few choices for a truly competent website platform.
Website providers have been scrambling the past 2-3 years revamping or overhauling their platforms to meet the SEO needs for car dealers. Today the SEO rat race in the automotive online retail business is about as over-saturated as CRM was 5 years ago. Mysteriously, while everyone now offers “the best SEO”, many dealers still lack vital understanding about the true role that SEO plays in one’s business.
An example of this was revealed to me during a phone call last week with a dealer group. The dealer contacted us about our content marketing services. He explained that he did his own keyword reporting using Web CEO and that he has effectively positioned his websites across thousands of keywords. He had a good video presence going but still when he searched for a particular set of keywords, his competitor sites appeared in the top results but not his. One of which he suggested sold a whopping “6″ cars a month, which is hardly any at all.
While scoping out everything and listening it was clear that not only did this dealer know and understand all the fundamental SEO practices but also was applying them to his online presence, and I told him this. I explained that he is doing everything we teach our dealers to do and that as far as I could tell he was far ahead of the game.
“But why does our competitor rank higher”, he asked.
My response was two-fold…
a.) Just because a site appears higher in a few searches you perform manually doesn’t mean it ranks higher for others nor does it mean the site ranks higher for the majority of keywords you target.
b.) Just because your competitor ranks higher doesn’t mean they sell more cars.
This second response was key. Dealers tend to approach SEO as some sort of silver bullet to their sales needs. But it’s not. SEO is about attraction, visibility, and possibility. I wouldn’t even classify SEO as creating sales opportunities. That’s what conversion accomplishes. SEO creates the possibility for conversion. Big difference.
I don’t know if this is what the dealer needed to or wanted to hear. I think appearing higher in search was more important to him than having a more successful business. I could be wrong. But what I took home from that conversation was the realization of how even the more sophisticated of dealers that has his head wrapped around all this SEO stuff, can sometimes miss the significance SEO has with your business.
If you are looking at video marketing as “the next big thing” or as a silver bullet to your online marketing needs, be warned. Video is great and highly effective, but it’s time-consuming and expensive. You will need good SEO to get your videos watched, and you will also need an effective conversion mechanism. Video itself is not the best conversion tool. Those that have experimented with viral video marketing may testify to this.
Promise in Automotive Blog Marketing
Just returned from a workshop we held today with the Automobile Dealers Association of Greater Philadelphia (Shouts out to Greta, thank you). The workshop concentrated on providing attendees with an applicable technique they could deploy at the dealership using their Blog, Email, SEO, Social Media Networking sites, and Video.
Interestingly, none of the near 30 attendees representing more than a dozen dealerships reported their dealership having a blog. While I am not surprised by this, I do think it hints at the blue ocean still remaining before us in the auto industry of incorporating blog strategies into a car dealer’s Internet Marketing Strategy.
The purpose of our workshop today was to show dealers a real-life way to utilize their blog in their Business Marketing and Advertising plans, the importance of permission-based email marketing, and how SEO must be considered a core part of any online marketing campaign. It was presumed that attendees had already crossed the Internet bridge and the SEO bridge, and we anticipated that many people present would be hoping to learn how to get a blog or start blogging. I confess not clarifying well enough in the beginning that our emphasis was on how to utilize your blog versus how to get one but I am confident people still were able to take something home that was useful.
The message we shared today is one that I have seen evolving in recent years and fortunately being embraced by most dealerships today. It’s the idea of selling a relationship and not a car which really is just Sales 101. But more important than the message is the “How?” and “Why?”. While the idea of selling a relationship and not a commodity sounds good and all, pulling it off is a challenge, especially for car dealers. And that is what we really covered today. Why use a blog and how it can be utilized?
So while the dealer industry is still in its infancy for incorporating Blog Marketing Strategies into their Business Marketing and Advertising plans, it was evident today seeing how much more welcome the idea of using blogs has become for dealers. A year ago I would have been chased out the room for saying the “B” word. Today it seemed we couldn’t talk about it enough.
Five SEO Tools of the Pros
Whether you’re new to the SEO industry or simply trying to add tools to your existing toolbox of resources, it’s always good to see what others are doing. Here are five important tools that SEO experts are using for online brand marketing, Internet marketing or any other goals.
1. Wordtracker
This handy website is an SEO user’s best friend. This is where you can find out what words people use when searching for the types of products or services that you offer. It also ranks the popularity of the different words that typical Internet users use, so you can tailor your website around the most popular keywords.
2. Google Analytics
With this resource, you can learn where your webpage visits originate and what the visitors are doing once they get to your page. And those are only two of many bits of information that Google Analytics provides so you can make your website as efficient as possible.
3. Thumbshot Rankings
You can find how certain keywords rank against each other so you can optimize your website more efficiently. It also gives you important statistics; for example, the average Internet user only visits the top two results provided by a search engine.
4. Copyscape
Everybody who has written for the Internet knows what this tool is. Copyscape helps prevent plagiarism by searching the billions of websites for copied content. This comes in handy if you’ve hired somebody to write content or if you want to make sure that other websites aren’t copying your existing content.
5. Webposition
As a website owner, you can use this resource to report your rankings, target your keywords, optimize your webpages and much more. It also includes trend graphs and tips for increasing revenue.
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.
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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