Automotive Marketing Professional Community for Car Dealers, OEM and Suppliers
Over the weekend I had an excellent conversation with a dealer who was weighing whether to invest more heavily in PPC advertising or to take the plunge into the world of SEO. She knew the stats and was well-aware that most clicks come from organic search (even noting that she, herself, could not recall ever clicking on a paid listing on Google) but she had the Forrest Gump Syndrome about the benefits of search engine optimization.
"You never know what you're gonna get," she said in a pitch-perfect Alabama Hanks voice.
Unfortunately, for the most part, she's right. In today's competitive automotive market, there are dozens of vendors with very similar pitches talking about what they're going to do. There's a catch-22 when asking what to expect with SEO services. Most will have the disclaimer that says something to the effect of "results may vary." Others will make impossible claims such as "You'll be #1 for all of your keywords, promise!"
It got me thinking over the weekend about what activities, tracking, and results the dealer should be expecting from their SEO vendor. I will go into more details in the future about how to grade a vendor's activities and results, but the low-hanging-fruit in this equation is knowing what an SEO vendor does with "the big 4" search components:
Google and Bing have never revealed their search ranking algorithms even in part, but they have both hinted that of the hundreds of things that go into determining ranking, there are 4 categories of components that a website can directly impact:
In the future I will post some questions dealers should ask and expectations they should have of their SEO providers, but this is a good place to start. Knowing what they do with these 4 components will open the door to knowing the truth about whether their SEO is real or like a box of chocolates.
Comment
@Marc - This is where the "expert trainer" and "trusted adviser" roles come into play. This industry is full of experts and it's full of advisers. Unfortunately, many aren't qualified. Dealers who have the ability to either vet their own options or find someone who can are much less likely to fall for good-but-insincere pitches or over-the-top seminars that are more pitching than training.
There are good ones in the industry as well, many of which are discussed here in depth, but having an in-house expert on SEM is a nice luxury. On a business level, we've had our best successes with dealer partners who are tech savvy and willing to work together to achieve their goals.
Lots of good common sense in this post JD. It's hard to believe that a great many SEO vendors are not aware of these facts. If a dealer feels they need to hire outside for this service the first thing they need is someone who is Google certified. If a person only passed the elementary tests they would know these items and more and it wouldn't be a question. I don't profess that this certification is a be all end all, but it's a very basic start of a conversation.
With the ever increasing importance of digital in the selling of cars, every dealer should have at least one person on staff who understand enough about SEM to insure the services provded are worth the added expense.
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Posted by Ralph Paglia on April 4, 2018
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