DealerOn, Inc. is a premier website and digital marketing company serving the retail automotive industry. In the last 12 months DealerOn’s websites have won virtually every meaningful industry award including: Driving Sales Top-Rated Website, Digital Dealer’s Overall Website Excellence Award, AWA’s Pinnacle Award, and Dealer Marketing Magazine’s Technology Award for Website Providers. DealerOn has become noted in the industry for their Lead Guarantee, based on their Digital Marketing Dashboard. Since creating this process in 2009, DealerOn has documented an average increase of over 200% in website lead volume for their auto dealer clients. To learn more about DealerOn’s Lead Guarantee, visit our website here.
This week’s Wednesday Workshop video is an awesome one… I was in the UK last month, speaking at one of the biggest SEO conferences in the world. For the first time ever, I did a horror movie theme for the presentation, and it turned out ridiculously awesome.
So, kick back – this week’s video is about 24 minutes long, but it’s packed full of amazing Local SEO tips AND awesome horror movie references…
In this week’s Wednesday Workshop, we share all of the upcoming events where you can see the Beard and the Hair live and in person… They’re both out on the road sharing awesome knowledge nuggets about SEO, PPC, and digital marketing in general.
If you’re at any of these events, make sure you find the DealerOn team and say “hi” – we’d love to hang out!
Want to know one of my secrets to staying ahead in Local SEO? Don’t believe everything I say. What do I mean by that? Well, it’s important to use industry research, knowledge, case studies, and best practices when putting your Local SEO strategy together. But you can’t just rely on other people’s research, even if they happen to be experts. The real way to get ahead of the curve is by doing your own testing and optimizing.
Let’s talk about that.
Now, I know that a LOT of people swear by the Local Search Ranking Factors survey (LSRF), heck, I’m one of the experts that contributes to it. And a lot of people were swayed by the most recent study put together by Andrew Shotland and Dan Leibson. Shotland and Leibson essentially tried to reverse-engineer Google’s search algorithm in hopes of finding out what areas of your website were weighted more heavily for optimization purposes. Of course, the truth is that while these are great resources that you should be using to formulate your Local SEO strategy, trusting them with blind faith won’t get you too far.
Why? Because, at the end of the day, your website needs a strategy that’s been tested (over and over again) within your industry.
Getting the structure for your gameplan from Local SEO experts is a good thing, but fine-tuning your strategy actually requires a little more attention from someone who knows your industry inside and out. And, hopefully, that’s you.
I’ve been leading sessions at a lot of conferences lately, and listening in on even more. While everyone has been taking sides on the LSRF survey vs. Shotland & Leibson study, I was actually a little surprised that more people weren’t testing things out themselves! More people were aligning themselves with either side of the fence, and sometimes their reasoning was as simple as, “It’s what I’ve always done.”
I don’t have to be a Local SEO expert to tell you that that kind of thinking isn’t helping your website gain visibility in the search engines. The way I see it, these two major studies were done by professionals who tried lots of different things, measured the results, compared the data, and drew conclusions. While it can get a little complicated, I’ll admit, I’ve always done my own testing and re-testing to find out what works best within my own industry – the automotive industry.
Auto dealers are different from financial service providers, which are different than retail businesses, and so on. One of the best examples of this is geo-optimizing.
Interestingly enough, this is an area where the LSRF and the Shotland and Leibson studies greatly differed. In many areas, they were generally headed in the same direction, which was to be expected, but not when it came to geo-optimizing.
According to the LSRF, geo-optimization is highly important, but Shotland & Leibson actually found it to be a near-useless metric. So…which one is correct? Turns out, they both are.
Whether or not geo-optimizing is a big factor for your website depends on how much competition is in your vertical. If all your competition is optimizing for geo-terms and they’re doing a consistently good job, then it won’t make much of a difference. And if you’re a dealership in a small town full of bad websites, then geo-optimizing will set you apart in a big way. Remember last year, when I wrote about unique content not being that important anymore (because everyone has unique content)? Yeah, it’s kinda like that.
The internet and the power of search engines is constantly evolving, so your Local SEO strategy needs to be laser-focused on what works for your industry. Yes, the experts are a great place to start, but if you really want to start getting ahead, go ahead and put on your white lab coat, grab your beakers, and start testing things like a mad scientist.
This week’s video is a really short one – but that’s on purpose.
It’s a metaphor for the content on the interior pages of your website.
Watch this week’s Wednesday Workshop to see what we mean…
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Managing a PPC campaign can sometimes seem like a free-for-all effort. There are lots of options and lots of ways to spend your money – but not all of them are worth your time. I’ve spent years in the SEM/PPC world, and I’ve noticed a trend in the way ad budgets are structured. Here are 6 ways to avoid wasting your PPC budget, based on the most common mistakes I see dealerships make.
This might be the most common mistake I see when auditing PPC processes – and it’s not unique to dealerships. For businesses that are closed at night and don’t have a 24-hour customer support system or call center, running ads 24/7 is a sure-fire way to waste money. If your dealership is closed and can’t follow up on a website lead, then why pay to drive traffic there? Imagine you have a compelling click-to-call ad that requires an internet sales rep to follow up with immediately. If the ad is being run 24/7, and someone happens to see it at 11:30 p.m., what happens? A whole lot of nothing. Make sure to double-check ads that are running nonstop, because if you can’t actually follow up with the lead in a timely fashion, it’s a wasted effort.
Conversion rates on overnight leads don’t have strong conversion rates, so allocate those dollars for ads during your dealership’s business hours.
Can you guess what’s wrong here? Two words in the subheading above are a dead giveaway: text and display. You technically have the option to run text-based ads on Google’s Display Network, but text ads are traditionally served in search engines. By serving text ads on image-heavy websites, your clicks may go down and your bounce rate may go up, as you’re more likely to get accidental clicks from users who will quickly leave your site. Further, text-based ads don’t look compelling next to display ads, and it’s not an optimal use of your money.
I hate to say it, but not everything Google offers is a golden goose. In other words, just because it’s an option for your PPC campaign, doesn’t mean it’s a good idea – even if it comes from Google. The Search Partner Network might seem like a great way to boost your impressions, but that metric is undermined by the quality of traffic you’ll get, not to mention it will hurt your overall campaign metrics. If you extend your audience to the Search Partner Network, where conversion & click rates are obscenely low, you’re simply lowering your overall metrics because it ties into your Google campaign as well.
Your negative keywords help target qualified traffic, plain and simple. If you’re not excluding negative keywords like “headlights” or “headrests” from your campaigns, for example, then you risk wasting your budget by serving ads to car customers who are looking to accessorize or repair – not buy.
Determine your campaign goals and make sure that you exclude all unqualified traffic by adding in the appropriate keywords. Here’s a pro tip: exclude other products by the OEM, if applicable. For example, Honda makes lawnmowers and cars, and serving an ad to someone who’s trying to cut their grass is a prime example of doing it wrong.
I’m not talking about grammar & verbiage issues (that should be at a premium!), I’m talking about how well the ad matches your landing page. Sad to say, misleading and/or poorly written ad copy is a very real problem that not only wastes money, but frustrates your potential customers.
If your advertisement says or implies one thing, but your customer finds something very different on your site when they click through, you’ve lost that lead. And, of course, that can negatively impact your metrics. Just think about how frustrating it is to spend time & effort investigating what you think is a good deal, but turns out to be wrong.
A robust, optimized ad is one that includes extensions. And that’s not just a matter of opinion, failure to make ad extensions can rank you lower in Google’s Search Network or even cause you to lose a bid to a competitor who did take the time to build out amazing extensions.
If it’s properly implemented, adding things like link, phone, and pricing extensions can help boost conversion rates significantly. But neglecting extensions is essentially keeping helpful information from your customers, who are eager to learn more (and fast) about their search query. Telling someone that you have new Toyota Camrys is nice, but what if the customer could look at inventory links, could see price ranges, could call you, and even see your address in the ad itself? It’s easy to see how that ad would win over a plain-text ad.
It’s important to note that quite a few of these PPC mistakes are the result of an automated advertising strategy. And, let’s be honest. If there’s anything more frustrating than wasting money, it’s paying a machine to do it for you. But that’s not to say that all automated strategies are bad, there’s a difference between “set it & forget it” and smart automation.
For some dealers, automated processes are the only way to manage a campaign, due to sheer volume. If any part of your PPC gameplan is automated, then test it against these 6 common mistakes to make sure you’re not “automatically” wasting money.
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