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4 Myths of Automotive SEO - By J.D Rucker

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#31
J.D., you are spot on.

>Myth #1: Thousand of Indexed Pages are Necessary.

A local comeptitor had a new site built.. with only 5 indexed pages, it sat at the top of google nationwide for 'dodge dealer' for many many months. it only started to slip when googlebot started finding all of it's 'spider food' spammy SEO pages :)

> Myth #2: People search for individual cars or by VIN

I die when I here his claim. who in the WORLD would do this? I can't imagine how you could search for a VIN for a car you don't yet know of!

>Myth #3: SEM Certification Means Better SEO

I personaly feel anyone who makes this claim is outright dishonest trying to market themselves to the ignorant. I did both SEO and SEM, for my own sites as well as others, for years before getting into the car business. I have the google cert. PPC skills simply do not convert over to SEM. Yes, PPC campaigns are great for insite into what keywords to optimize for. but thats it.

>Myth #4: Flash Websites cannot be optimized

they certainly can. And who says a flash SITE needs to only be 1 page? even so, 1 page sites can still do very well in SERPs.

We are neck deep in dishonest vendors playing on the general ignorance of most dealers.

I used to spend a TON of time on SEO... I no longer think it's worth as much effort as I once did.
Why?
1) you can just buy the top spot and get tons of traffic. Not as challenging, but pretty darn easy. I really don't feel the need to bend over to pick up a dime when there are so many dollars just laying on the table.
2) By far the largest source of traffic and leads I get are are from keywords I could never compete with on the SEO side. examples: "dodge", "chrysler".

SEO is free traffic - and free is great. But it will never come close to good SEM campaigns. Not a day goes buy were I don't think or do something regarding SEO. But I no longer let it occupy so darn much of my time and brain cycles - no more staying up to 3 am :)
 
#33
SEO has low/poor ROI if you are the only palyer in your organization staying up till 3 am thinking of how to sell more cars! hahaha...

I had much better luck. I had a buy in from the top to use the Net as a cheap advertising tool. We mark down aged and offer up loss leaders to motivate shoppers (ala "old school").

Results?
I had SEO wired for lots of excellent long tail SERPs and it all worked! 20% of all sales were greater than 1 hours drive. Now that's new business and that's ROI!

Summary:
What good is all the countless marketing hours if your merchandise ain't positioned right?!!?

Killer Internet Marketing can only succeed with a TEAM EFFORT.

just my $0.02...
Joe
 
#35
Joe,
our product mix/pricing seems to be pretty good. our used cars have a 33 day turnover - the new about double that. But thats well outside my area of responsibility.

In our state we are not allowed advertise ANY special pricing (internet only prices, employee prices, military discounts, rebates for returning chrysler customers, etc). Plus, whatever price we put on a website, the floor has to divulge and offer to every single customer who walks in. So my hands are tied in this regard - the GSM and used car manager call those shots.

I manage all the internet marketing, but I don't sell or set appointmets. Everything goes to the floor. So from that perspective, it's certainly a team effort here. Plus, my family owns the dealership, so I don't get too much flak :)

Internet sales is not a problem here - it's gone for non-existant to over 50% of our business in 12 months (new and used) :)

Are you working for an independent?
that would be a whole other story then, as used cars sales on the net are MUCH more inventory driven then new cars! Whereas I can generate tons of leads from keywords like 'dodge' or 'jeep', I doubt that an independant would enjoy the same success. You certainly have a much tougher road to travel... and hence long tail might just prove to be your bread and butter. i never thought of it from that perspetive.
 
#36
I agree with a large amount of what you said, but like everyone else have some comments:

Myth #1/#2 -

Most of what you said was true, but when you used the example:

used toyota camry minneapolis" - 28
"toyota minneapolis" - 32,430

as the reasoning for being relevant for the major terms, I think you missed the boat. Although I of course want to be ranked high for "toyota minneapolis", I don't know what those searchers are looking for. It could be car (insert year and model), could be truck (insert year and model), could be SUV, service, parts, bodyshop, racing info, hats, t-shirts, etc. The point is those generic searches are definitely something that I don't want to be invisible on, but I definitely don't want to miss 28 people who did targeted searches for a specific car that I may have many in stock. As searches get more specific the conversion rates go up, and fewer competitors are showing up in the listings. And if I have a website that would deep-link directly to my used camrys then that would be a bonus too.

And I hope that vendors suggesting that even VIN's can be read are not saying that is how consumers would search, but rather that the spiders are reading specific content.

Myth#4

Most vendors have created their platforms in outdated technology and flash platforms try to stuff keywords at the bottom or around the sides, but the flash itself is not read.

BUT in 2007 Adobe released Flash 9 which allows for everything to be developed in text and rendered to the end user in Flash. This allows for spiders and bots to read the text version and consumer to get a professional experience. www.saford.com is a great example.
 
#37
great stuff, it always amazes me how many dealerships overlook a focus on organic search engine optimization. In my personal opinion it's best to stay away from flash, that said I do agree with you in that having a flash site isn't instant death, there are a lot of things we can do to optimize a flash website for a dealership.
 
#38
Great post although I have to disagree with the JD's original posting.

Myth #1: The more indexed pages does help with your SEO efforts as this is part of Google's algorithms. How big of a factor it is only Google knows.

To continue on this point. I believe it is extremely important that your website indexes your inventory pages individually not only for having more content, but also having FRESH CONTENT! Google's algorithms also looks at how often a website is updated.

That said, you add these two factors up and indexing your inventory is of great value.

I do agree that it will not help much with getting direct clicks to your site, eventhough I do see clicks with inventory specific searches, I think this is a very small portion of searchers.

Myth #2: Good point, but you are forgetting that you have more then just a used Camry on your lot. You have to add all searches for vehicles in your market that you have in your inventory to really make a valid comparison.

Myth #3: Never heard that before,obviously BS, so I have to agree.

Myth #4: Although lots of improvements have and will be made to make FLASH more search engine friendly, take a look at the big ecommerce websites and see whether they use FLASH. Nope that;s right, they don't.

My advice for dealers and website developers: Take a look at what the leads in the ecommerce market are doing. I am not talking about the car industry only. Look at how a website like Target.com tries to complete a sale and what kind of technologies they use. These companies spend millions on their design with attention to detail.

Target for example makes the steps to purchasing an item very clear and highlights the next step in light yellow, so the customer knows what to do next. These companies improve, because they have very good tracking tools on abandonment rates and many more things that allow them to improve both visitors and conversion.

Regarding the big sell in the market right now to get on the Video SEO. Remember, that having your inventory on Youtube does get you exposure, but does not get you the leads you want. Really the videos need to be on your website and hosted on your website, not embedded from Youtube or a third party provider. It is the same as some website vendors using a third party tool to display inventory on their dealers websites, which in return these pages are indexed under the third party tool's website and not the dealer website.

So, in short: Increase traffic to your site by using basic SEO techniques. Best way to do this is to have incoming links with keywords as the tag text coming from related websites.
 

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