Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

It’s a pretty common practice for people to Google their own name. Sometimes out of curiosity, but sometimes to help ensure your name (or your dealership’s name) isn’t showing up on webpages you don’t want it to. You Google your dealership name to help ensure it appears where you want it to (and doesn’t where you don’t), but do you Google your dealership website’s original content?

Google is known for punishing websites that have duplicate content on their site, meaning the exact content appears on other websites. But in a recent Matt Cutts video, Google’s head of search spam announced that Google’s position has shifted and the search engine company is now making strides to group websites that have the same content, and showing the best of that group in search results. This helps them not punish sites that are validly quoting or referencing content, while still maintaining a cleaned up search results page.  That is why it’s so important to know which websites are using content that you created, especially if your dealership website is not the one of the sites chosen for display.

So how does Google know which website had the content first, which sites are using it after the fact, and whether or not the content is being used properly? No one truly knows how the Google search algorithm is written, but Google has now given us a way to let them know when you find your original content on another website without your dealership’s permission.

Go to the Google Scraper Report, enter the URL of the page on your dealer website which displays the content, the exact URL of the offending site (where your content is being used), and the search result URL that shows your website being outranked by duplicate content.  You can find these offending pages by taking portions of the content you or your advertising agency has created for your dealership website and search for it on Google using quotation marks around the phrase or sentence. The search results pages that show should display all sites that have that content on them. Are any of them outranking your dealership website? Use the Google Scraper Report to let the search engine giant know.

This is your best way of alerting Google to duplicate, SPAM filled websites that are using your original content to outrank your dealership website in the search results. It will also help Google improve their search results listings by helping to ensure the original content gets ranked above scraper sites.

The scraper tool doesn’t promise any resolution, but it’s a start. Check to make sure the content your dealership creates isn’t being used to help someone rank above you.

There are thousands of things to manage in each and every dealership, including your dealer website.  So much attention is devoted to leads, conversion rate, vehicle detail pages, etc., that sometimes it’s easy to forget one of the most basic SEO factors for your website – the speed at which it loads.

According to KISSmetrics, 47% of consumers expect a web page to load in 2 seconds or less, and 40% of people will leave a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load. When you factor in the immediacy of information most Americans are used to using their smart phones and other mobile devices, are you serving your dealership’s website to potential buyers fast enough?

Why a Fast-Loading Dealership Website is Important:

Google – Google made it clear years ago that they use site speed as a ranking factor – it appears that their algorithm is designed to penalize websites that are slow to load. This gives your fast loading site a leg up on your competition in search engine results.

Visitors – A quick loading website can help reduce bounce rates and increase conversion rates. The faster your visitors are able to access the content they are looking for, the less likely they are to go to another dealership website. You’ve probably designed your dealership’s website to help visitors find the vehicle they’re interested in as quickly as possible, so make sure you aren’t slowing them up with a slow load time.

How to Tell:

There are a number of free tools online that will test how long it takes your website to load, and most offer suggestions to increase the speed. Just enter the URL you’d like to test. I’ve listed a few below, but you can search online for “site speed test” to find more.

Page Speed Insights (from Google)

Pingdom

Another, simple way to test how quickly your car dealership website is loading is to do it yourself! Use different devices (for mobile, test on both wi-fi and the mobile network) to time how quickly your website loads.  Remember that Google factors in page speed for each type of device (desktop, tablet and phone), so make sure you test the top pages on your site for each device type.

What You Can Do:

Minimize the types of files that auto-load when your site is launched – things like videos, music, or animations can slow down the initial load time. When possible, simplify the design of your website. Talk to your website provider about how their websites are structured and coded, and what they can do to help you achieve your site speed goals.

Google is constantly evolving their algorithms and search engine focus, and 2012 was a year full of changes your dealership needed to be aware of.  Here are some of the major changes Google made this past year:

Increased Focus on Reputation & Trust

Google made algorithm changes to penalize sites that didn’t have credible and relevant content, design, and external links.  Over optimization became an issue, with Google recommending Webmasters focus on quality, relevant content that was regularly updated.

Algorithm Updates: Penguin and Panda

Penguin focused on penalizing websites with artificial external links, while Panda penalized sites for too much low-quality content. These updates were constantly being unrolled throughout the year; Panda had over 20 updates, and Penguin had over 10.  This shows that Google is not only updating their algorithms, but they are consistently fine tuning their updates to return the most accurate results to searchers.

Increased Communication

Typically, Google is pretty close-lipped about anything they do.  In 2012, however, they actually announced upcoming algorithm changes and sent messages to those sites with black hat webspam. This is a welcome change from years past where Google always kept Webmasters guessing.

Decreased Organic Search Listings per Page

As Google finds more ways to make money (Local Listings, Paid Search, etc), the amount of space on search results pages dedicated to organic listings keeps decreasing. Make sure you’re keeping an eye on the results in your area to make sure you’re still appearing where you want to.

If any of these were news to you, or you are unfamiliar with the updates, make sure you to talk your auto dealership website or SEO provider to help you understand and stay up to date with the world of search engine optimization.

It seems as though Google continues to be more transparent than in the past, which is great for webmasters. At the Search Engine Strategies conference in San Francisco last week, I had the chance to take part in a Q&A with the famous Matt Cutts, head of Google’s webspam team.  One of the attendees asked Matt about the Penguin update and what it meant going forward.  I’m paraphrasing Matt here, but he said that webmasters should expect Penguin updates to continue and to be “jarring” for a while.  Matt also specified that links would continue to be a primary factor in determining the ranking of a website.  I think that’s why Google is devoting so much time and resources to Penguin, which is in some respects an audit for the validity of links across the web.

The conversation continued on the Search Engine Roundtable blog post, where Matt clarified his comments about the continued release of the update. “We’re still in the early stages of Penguin where the engineers are incorporating new signals and iterating to improve the algorithm. Because of that, expect the next few Penguin updates will take longer, incorporate additional signals, and as a result will have more noticeable impact.”  In other words, the Penguin update will continue to evolve and probably have a larger impact on websites as the updates are released.

In a further showing of transparency, Matt Cutts answered a question via Twitter that asked what webmasters could fix in order to avoid being caught off guard by future Penguin updates. Cutt’s response? “…certainly links are a primary area to monitor. Been true all this year; expect to continue.”

Knowing the focus of Penguin will continue to be on the links to and from your auto dealer website, make sure you talk to your dealer website provider.  Do they have a plan to deal with future updates?  How are they tracking which sites link to your website, and which sites you are linking to? It’s important to take the transparency Google shows and use it to put your site in the best situation possible to weather the future Penguin updates.

It’s not often that Google announces when they are going to make changes to their algorithm in advance, but they did just that on Tuesday.

The latest update under the Panda name went into effect Tuesday night, Panda 3.9.  Panda was originally released in February 2011 as a way to remove low-quality content from Google’s search results.

Google made this announcement via their Twitter account:

“New data refresh of Panda starts rolling out tonight. ~1% of search results change enough to notice. To put this Panda update into perspective here’s some context: goo.gl/huekf”

Your dealership can avoid being penalized by any of the Panda updates by making sure you have high-quality content on your auto dealer website.  This means that the information is relevant, up to date, and provides the info your customers are looking for.

If you are worried about how this update may be affecting your car dealership website, talk to your dealer website provider about their search engine optimization (SEO) efforts, and what they are doing to keep your site up to date.