Agreed. The conclusion is very open-ended at this point and I didn't mean for that to be my all-inclusive conclusion on the matter.
Rather, my point was that when it comes to SEO and SEM, I firmly believe that if someone is doing nothing, the changes that can be made by simply doing "something" are fairly drastic. That something has to be done correctly and implemented with a degree of intelligence, but I don't think it's fair to say that we accomplished something amazing just because we got results from our work.. I'd like to have 100 clients with a cookie-cutter process that can be replicated before I claim I'm "successful".
For what it's worth, in the case of this store we ended up doing a fairly integrated AdWords campaign:
1. We exported from the database a list of all vehicles in different formats (ie: YEAR MAKE MODEL TRIM, YEAR MAKE MODEL, MAKE MODEL TRIM, etc) and we imported this excel into AdWords and assigned a small dollar amount to it while pushing all traffic from those ads to a URL that shows them the MAKE and MODEL they clicked an ad for.
2. We created a very tight geographical radius for the campaign and tried to target strictly the customers that were shopping outside of their own "home area". This was interesting and we are still working on improvements to it to this day, but trying to target customers who live in one place, but work in the big city nearby is an interesting process and it seems to be yielding good results as far as these customers being fairly targeted.
For a $1000/month campaign it has more sub-groups than any other campaign we've run before and it's been a great learning experience.
