All Posts By

Ali Amirrezvani

In Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Can Knowing Google’s Market Share Help With Your Dealership Marketing Plan?

Google seems to be everywhere lately, especially with their introduction of +1 and Google Plus.  Many people have so many different aspects of their life integrated into the search engine (email, social network, search engine, calendar, document management, etc) that sometimes it is hard to remember how we ever got along without it.

Most estimates put Google’s search market share between 65% and 70%, but I have seen estimates as high as 80-90%, which is closer to where it is in other countries.  Knowing the market share of different search engines can be helpful when planning your marketing strategies.  For example, with the recent changes Google has made to their review pages, knowing the percentage of market share Google has could help your dealership decide how to adjust your review strategy.  Based on the data I’ve seen, there is Google, and then everyone else is perhaps 20-25% of the market.  Therefore, any search engine marketing strategy has to revolve around Google to make it worth your while.

Judging by your sites’ search engine traffic data (Google vs. Yahoo vs. Bing vs. others), what would your estimate be of Google’s search market share?  How have you used the amount of market share Google has to determine your dealership’s marketing plans?

In Search Engine Marketing (PPC)

Google Is Putting PPC Ads on the Bottom of SERP Pages

One of the SEO sites that I frequently read (www.searchengineland.com) has a VERY interesting post by a  reader, LebSEO Design’s Wissam Dandan.  He has found examples of Google Adwords ads appearing at the bottom of the page for some searches.

No one on our search team at DealerOn has come across these examples yet, and  judging by the information I’ve seen on other SEO industry blogs, it’s a fairly limited test, since not many searchers are.

This could have interesting implications to PPC buys if Google decides to keep this test as a permanent feature.  I haven’t seen anything about how Google would report on the placement for ads that run at the bottom of a results page.

This could be a positive for dealers using PPC as a marketing strategy. If your ads were previously being pushed to page 2, they may now be on the bottom of page 1.

I wonder how Google will incorporate these ad positions into their “Position Preference” targeting.    It is entirely possible that ads would be more effective on a Cost-Per-Acquisition (CPA) basis when they’re at the bottom of the page.  Potentially you could target your campaigns to reach users that had scrolled through the organic results to the bottom of the page, most likely not finding what they were looking for.  This could be very interesting and a huge campaign management changer for PPC providers.

What are your thoughts on how this might impact your Google Adwords campaigns?

In Search Engine Marketing (PPC)

Is Your Dealership Taking Advantage of Google’s Mobile Ads?

It is almost hard to comprehend how fast mobile Internet usage is growing.  According to Google, more smartphones were sold last year than PCs.  It’s predicted that 50% of Americans will have a smartphone by the end of the year and that there will be 10 billion mobile Internet devices in 2012, up from the 2 billion that are activated today.  A child is more likely to own a cell phone than a book!

How is that going to impact the car buying experience and your online strategy?  With 51% of mobile car shoppers using search engines to research their next vehicle purchase, it’s extremely important that your dealership has a well-optimized mobile site and a well thought-out mobile marketing strategy.  One tactic your dealership may want to consider is using Google Mobile Ads to target mobile web users with pay per click (PPC) ads.

In addition to the regular PPC ads that you’re running (which can be viewed by mobile users on full-browser devices), you can use the Google Mobile Ads to target mobile phone customers who don’t have full-browsers on their smartphones.  Google has reported that advertisers using a mobile-only AdWords campaign, designed to target mobile customers who don’t have full-browser devices, can increase click-through rates by 11.5%.

Mobile Ads also allow you to have a separate keyword list than your normal AdWords campaigns, so you can tailor your keyword lists to the shorter keywords this type of mobile web searchers tend to use.  Remember that if you’re going to run mobile ads on Google, you have to use a mobile website landing page—it’s not just a best practice, it’s a requirement.

Has anyone adopted any mobile strategies that they’ve found to be particularly effective or any that have proven not to be?

In Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Tips for Car Dealers Taking a Fresh Look at Your SEO

The process of maximizing the amount of traffic and leads that your website generates from Google can be daunting.  Here are some basic things that our SEO team at DealerOn recommends focusing on if you are either changing website providers, contracting with a SEO or PPC vendor, or simply taking the pulse of the performance of your site and marketing efforts.

Determine Which Keywords You Should be Targeting – Working with your vendors, develop a list of which keywords your dealership is targeting and which ones you should be targeting.  Make sure to analyze your web analytics so that you don’t miss any important keywords that are already generating traffic and leads.  Also, use available free resources (see my post on Free Online Tools for dealers) that can provide further keyword discovery (including Google’s Keyword Tool, Spyfu, Compete.com).

Determine Your Baseline – After you have your keyword lists, you should develop a historical baseline for your list.  For each important keyword, track traffic volumes and website lead volumes.  Ideally, you should also run a dealership SEO report card every quarter or so.  If you’re going to hire a company to drive traffic to your website, either via SEO or PPC, you should know your starting point so you can measure the value that your vendor is providing in incremental traffic and leads.

Use Website Analytics – Search engine rankings are worthless if they don’t translate into traffic, so make sure you know which keywords are actually driving traffic to your site.  Compare this list with your targeted keywords to see how effective/worthwhile your efforts are and have been.  For example, if you’re ranked #1 for a keyword but that keyword isn’t driving any traffic to your site, it’s time to rethink your strategy.

Check PPC Landing Pages and Micro-Sites – Even though you may not think of these sites as part of your SEO strategy, they should be.  While maintaining a focus on conversion, make sure any content and the structure of the page is done with SEO in mind, even if the primary reason you’ve created the content is not organic search.

Meet with Vendors – You may have several parties (website provider, PPC provider, SEO vendor, digital agency, etc) involved with your search engine strategies.  You should have periodic reviews with all of them (even have group meetings together) about how you can continue to improve and evolve your search marketing efforts.  Doing your research beforehand allows you to work with, and push, your vendors to get the most value possible for your dealership.

What other tips do you have for someone that wants to take a fresh look at the SEO efforts on their car dealership website?  Where did you start on your site?

In Dealership Websites

Free Web Tools for Car Dealership Websites

In a follow-up comment to a post I wrote last week about social media web tools, Jared Hamilton asked me about other free tools I’d recommend for dealers and internet managers to be as effective as possible in their daily marketing efforts.  Below are some tools that various team members at DealerOn use or have used in the past.

Compete.com –By entering your website and those of your competitors, you can see site traffic history, competitive analytics, and your “Compete Rank”, a stat based on unique visitors.

Quantcast.com — Similar information to Compete.com, Quantcast gives you another site to triangulate on information about your website, your visitors, and your competitors’ website visitors.

Spyfu.com – Not free, but they provide a free trial, and if you find it useful, it’s fairly cheap.  Spyfu provides information about your competitors keywords (organic and paid), ad copy, and spend levels.  The data isn’t perfect, but it’s interesting and helpful.

Website Grader–This is similar to Compete.com, providing information on various aspects of your site (metadata, readability level, indexed pages, linking domains, etc), and ways you can improve your website’s score.

Google Keyword Tool–This well-known tool allows you to see how many searches are done on a keyword, as well as related terms.  It’s a good, basic way to help start your keyword research for your website.  It also serves as a keyword discovery tool–providing additional keyword suggestions, that Google views as similar to the keywords you provide.

Google Webmaster Tools–Get the most out of your website by seeing how Google sees your site, get information about internal and external links, and make sure Google has your sitemap.

Google Analytics–I recently wrote a post about the importance of incorporating this analytics tool on your dealership site.  There’s absolutely no good reason not to have it, its free, and even if you don’t check it but every few months, getting your site coded today, will mean that 2 months from now, you haveenough data to actually draw some conclusions about your site and your traffic.

Google Alerts–At a minimum, your dealership should be tracking when your employee’s names, dealership name, and competitors’ brand names are mentioned online.  Results are delivered to your email inbox.

Backlink Checker–By simply entering your URL, you can find out how many backlinks Yahoo, Bing, and Google have to your site.  You can click onto the results to see which sites are linking to your website.  This is a useful stat to keep an eye on–if there is a sudden increase or decrease, you’ll want to find out why.

If you have any questions about how best to use these or other free web tools, feel free to contact DealerOn at clientresults@dealeron.com.  Are there are any other free web tools that your dealership uses?  Please share below.

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