Search Engine Optimization (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?

Have you seen the new offering from Google for local search? Unless you live in Austin, Portland, Madison or San Diego, chances are that you haven’t. Google’s new “Beta” Local Directory Portals are a bit of a mix between their place pages and Yelp. They let users look at all of the businesses in a city in one place (similar to Yelp’s model).

Here is a screenshot of Google Portland.

You can sort by category, and then drill down even further using the filters. While there is no automotive category yet (the tool seems to lean a bit more towards tourists/visitors), it’s another example of how important Google Places is now and will be in the future.

These local portals are pulling their results directly from Google Places listings, including the reviews. In fact, one way to sort is by rating. If your dealership doesn’t have a lot of good, quality reviews, you may not appear above the fold.

If you haven’t already, I can’t stress enough how important it is to claim your listing and make sure it is as complete as possible. This means photos, videos, categories, reviews, and information is completely filled out and accurate.

Google’s Local Portals are just another example of how Google is relying more and more on the information in their Places, and why your auto dealership needs to have an accurate representation in the Places realm. How do you think this new offering will impact the local auto dealer industry?

While using Google’s AdWords Keyword tool is a good place to start when you are trying to come up with a keyword list for your dealership online marketing, a lot of people start there, which means your competitors could have a very similar keyword list as your dealership.  To help you stay a step ahead, I want to highlight some of the alternative keyword tools I’ve found.

Facebook has Lexicon, released in April of 2008.  When you enter a keyword or phrase, the tool will count “occurrences of words and phrases” on the Walls of their users.  This can be a great tool to track the trending of keywords your dealership is interested in, but it doesn’t show an actual total.  You need a Facebook login to use the tool, and it appears they are working on a new Lexicon tool in Beta.

Another tool for keyword list generation is Google’s Wonder Wheel search feature.  After conducting a regular Google search for a potential keyword, click on “More Options”, then “Wonder wheel”.  Google will then show you a diagram with related keywords as spokes around your original search.  Click on any of the spokes to expand the diagram, showing related keywords to the spoke you clicked on.

While Google’s AdWords Keyword tool is more in depth than the two tools I’ve talked about here, using alternative keyword list generation tools could possibly expose your dealership to new keywords to use while promoting your auto dealer website.

Have you ever gone to add your auto dealer website to Google Places only to find someone else has already claimed and verified it?  We run into this from time to time while setting up listings, and recently found this information on what to do.

First, make sure no one in your dealership has already taken the initiative to set up and claim your businesses listing.  Once you’ve done this, here are the steps to take:

Create your listing, making sure that:

• Your dealership name, address, URL, and email address are exact
• Add a local phone number, not an 800 number
• Create a 200-character or less description of your dealership
• Make the listing as interactive as possible with up to ten images smaller than 1MB and 1024×1025 pixels, as well as links to up to five videos.
• Describe what makes your dealership different from your competitors in the additional details section.
• Verify your listing through Google.

After you have your completely accurate listing created and verified, you have to tell Google Places that there are duplicate listings.  Go to the listing you didn’t create (that you want removed) and click on “Edit this Place”.

Select the “Place has another listing” button and enter the URL of your accurate listing and state that you want the previous entry removed.  Make sure you check back to ensure the listing was removed within a few weeks–you may have to go through the removal process multiple times.

Ever wondered how Google’s search engine works?  This cool info-graphic is definitely worth taking a look at.  While it doesn’t give away the things Google uses to rank sites, it does lend some insight into how the search engine delivers the websites you search for.

How Google Works

Infographic by the Pay Per Click Blog