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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In a previous post, we talked about website optimization as a general concept and laid out some ground rules for A/B testing to gauge how visitors interact with your site. Driving traffic to your site is a worthwhile effort, but it can quickly become worthless if you never track which buttons are being clicked, which pages are being viewed, and what path your customers are taking to conversion.
Now, it’s time to get specific, so let’s talk about how to optimize your homepage.
Odds are, your homepage is the most heavily trafficked page on your website, so content matters a lot. Most can be separated into four different sections, which you can see below:
Top right header – Logo, Branding, & Identity
Top left header – Titles & Contact Info
Lower header – Global Navigation
Below header – Main Content
Every site will be organized slightly differently, but for the most part, that’s the universal template. Your mobile homepage will have a variation of the same layout as well.
Your homepage’s headers act a bit like a driver’s license for the page. They tell the visitor what site they’re on, what page they’re viewing, and how to get in touch with your dealership – all the basics. Consistent headers actually help people interpret webpages as part of your website. For example, consistent headers would tell someone that your service page and a vehicle detail page both belong to the same website, even though the content on the two pages is quite different.
Within your headers, logo and branding consistency is also a key part of homepage optimization. And just like with headers in general, it’s the absence that speaks volumes. A website with a different headers & logo placement on each page would be extremely hard to navigate, frustrating users.
Moreover, having logos that aren’t hyperlinked to the homepage can contribute to that confusion as well. Again, being able to navigate from page to page (or get back “home”) is a function that most people come to expect now.
Additionally, your logo should always be in the top left part of your header, paired with your dealership’s title.
In the olden days of website design, you would include a “Contact” link in the site’s footer, and your address & location were only visible after someone clicked through. While the “Contact Us” page is absolutely necessary, your address and phone number should also be spelled out in the top right header area.
Instead of hiding your contact info on an internal page, display it at the very top of each page.
Lots of websites (not just car dealer websites) rely on form submissions as a main source of internet leads. When site visitors want to interact with your dealership, they’re most likely going to fill out a form, exchanging some information for an appointment, a phone call, or maybe a coupon.
So then, site navigation is incredibly important to optimizing for conversion, as are CTAs. As the heatmap below illustrates, most users read in an “F-pattern” and take in data from left to right, top to bottom – reading less and less as they scan down the page.
What does that tell us? Put all your pertinent links and CTAs in the red areas, where people’s eyes are naturally going.
As far as global navigation goes, we see the best results when dealers put their “Home,” “New Cars,” and “Used Card” pages on the left hand side of their navbar, and the “About” and “Contact Us” pages on the far right.
And here’s an extra tip: using a “home” icon on the navbar can help lower the number of people who click there as a “reset” strategy. Why? An icon is more subtle than plain text, and therefore a little less noticeable. Users are more likely to leave your website after resetting to your homepage, so you don’t want to disrupt the conversion process if at all possible.
While it’s not usually a good idea to use icons in place of text (it can get very confusing, very quickly), the “home” icon can help guide user flow to a CTA that your dealership has found to have a high conversion rate. To put it simply, don’t make it any easier than it already is for potential leads to get distracted and bounce off your site.
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