Pre-Owned (Used) Vehicle Promotions via Video for SEO... Good Idea or Bad...

Is it wise to promote used cars with UTube, Google Video, ect...? Although it does drastically raise SEO, vehicles are typically sold prior to the time they hit optimization... Is anyone else concerned about disrupting hard earned SEO placements for your actual URL's? How about CSI with potential customers being told same vehicle is sold but still promoted?

SEM for used promotions seems like the higher road... What do you all think?

I would appreciate the input of other Automotive Digital Professionals on this subject.

DTG

Tags: cars, csi, dtg, pre-owned, promotion, sales, sem, seo, used, video

▶ Reply to This

Replies to This ADM Discussion

Permalink Reply by Matt Watson on November 21, 2008 at 9:35pm: Well our Video SEO solution is based on actual vehicles in stock and removes the videos of the sold vehicles daily so you wouldn't have any sort of compliance issues with that depending on what provider you used.

I think the key to Video SEO is it simply gives your dealership more visibility and removes someone else from being in the rankings in that spot. If you can have 2-3 of the top 10 for a term based on video SEO, blogs, your websites, etc... that is better than only 0 or 1. Improve your odds!; ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by David T. Gould on November 22, 2008 at 1:20pm: Good chatting with you again Matt... I am not the technical guy here but won't the SEO ranking stay even after the vehicle is removed? Would the link go to dead or be unconnected? Or are you shifting it towards the dealer's site?

Trying to wrap my head around the implications here prior to promoting.

Thanks,

David; ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by Matt Watson on November 22, 2008 at 1:59pm: You can also post stock videos/infomercials unrelated to a specific vehicle inventory that would never get removed. Post one for each model you sell that is generic to that model. Example being a short commercial about a Ford Edge or something.

The link would probably get a message that says "This video has been removed by the user." on YouTube. So the question is how fast does Google remove those links for their search engine. I would guess pretty fast.

Yesterday I posted in a forum and create a new page on a website and 3 hours later Google had already indexed it and the two pages were #1 and #2 on Google. It was for something non related to automotive stuff. But it was amazing how fast they picked it up.; ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by Ted Frazier on November 22, 2008 at 4:56pm: "...Although it does drastically raise SEO, vehicles are typically sold prior to the time they hit optimization..."
-I'm going to back up what Matt said about the speed of Google's indexing, it's much faster than it was three years ago so I think this is no longer an issue.

"...Is anyone else concerned about disrupting hard earned SEO placements for your actual URL's?..."
-This is an idea that(in my experience) is usually propagated by certain web site companies that don't want you splitting your advertising dollars so they claim that off-site SEO, micro-sites, etc. will somehow hurt your primary website's placement or "dilute" your online presence. I don't buy that. I agree with Matt that multiple SEO methods will only provide additional streams of visitors and that can only be a good thing.

"...How about CSI with potential customers being told same vehicle is sold but still promoted?..."
-Again, indexing speed is fast and getting faster.; ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by Matt Watson on November 22, 2008 at 5:36pm: How do you like our new Inventory Dashboard?; ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by Ted Frazier on November 24, 2008 at 5:38pm: Well, I just showed it to a customer today actually. Although slightly confused at first, they figured it out in about one minute. The ISM liked the comments pie chart because they like to add their own comments to each car and he could quickly see which ones were missing comments.; ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by Matt Watson on November 24, 2008 at 6:17pm: We are just getting started on it. It was one of our test Silverlight projects :-); ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by Tomer Alpert on November 24, 2008 at 12:02pm: Good post, here's some info:

We've configured our system to not add the stock number, VIN or price to protect the dealer against state advertising laws.

We are currently working on some innovations to bring live price and inventory info to the consumer inside the video. Are you familiar with what we're doing with our new service, PushTube?; ▶ Reply to This