We are looking for an SEM/SEO/Digital Marketing Company, suggestions? Anyone heard of PCG?

[AutomoSEO]

That's good to hear. How about conversion optimization and multivariate testing? Or lead generation so you can build email marketing lists consisting of more than just previous sales and service customers? Just trying to see what your current provider isn't doing since I've got a 100 ways to grow leads and web presence just not sure what's being done already. We can optimize code for site speed, integrate schema.org, clean up W3C and CSS validation., ientify duplicate content issues or questionable backlink profiles.Tons of one time services that can make a big difference are available if anyone wants us to scan for weaknesses.

 

[Chris Cachor]

That's good to hear. How about conversion optimization and multivariate testing?

I'm taking an educated guess here, but most (if not all) website vendors won't allow this, due to the fact that they're all on a central, shared code-base. I read the thread, and there's quite a laundry list of things to go through that, really, won't allow the website vendors to make much money due to the time involved. I'd be shocked that any of them actively do this for the their clientele. It's A LOT of time.

Multivariate and A/B testing are really ways of highly optimizing your pages. They won't really take you from 0-60 but instead maybe something like 87-100. Very large volume traffic, with very well run tests. Otherwise, it's sort of like shuffling papers. You can really gain a lot before doing A/B testing, IMO.

Sean, your best bet is to get your sites and SEO under one roof. Hiring an outside SEO company will be challenging because they do not have technical control over the website and will ask the website vendor for changes that won't be implemented. If you're happy with the sites and would like to create separate marketing sites, then going with an outside company may be beneficial and you may get some more attention from them.

 

[SeanWoodruff]

I'm taking an educated guess here, but most (if not all) website vendors won't allow this, due to the fact that they're all on a central, shared code-base. I read the thread, and there's quite a laundry list of things to go through that, really, won't allow the website vendors to make much money due to the time involved. I'd be shocked that any of them actively do this for the their clientele. It's A LOT of time.

Multivariate and A/B testing are really ways of highly optimizing your pages. They won't really take you from 0-60 but instead maybe something like 87-100. Very large volume traffic, with very well run tests. Otherwise, it's sort of like shuffling papers. You can really gain a lot before doing A/B testing, IMO.

Sean, your best bet is to get your sites and SEO under one roof. Hiring an outside SEO company will be challenging because they do not have technical control over the website and will ask the website vendor for changes that won't be implemented. If you're happy with the sites and would like to create separate marketing sites, then going with an outside company may be beneficial and you may get some more attention from them.

Doing it under one roof isn't an option, we have several dealerships that would be included with this. Our current marketing company already does this. We give them technical control over the site so that they can make changes, build pages, etc. They also work directly with Dealer.com to make changes and it's pretty seamless.

 

[yagoparamo]

I'm taking an educated guess here, but most (if not all) website vendors won't allow this, due to the fact that they're all on a central, shared code-base. I read the thread, and there's quite a laundry list of things to go through that, really, won't allow the website vendors to make much money due to the time involved. I'd be shocked that any of them actively do this for the their clientele. It's A LOT of time.

Multivariate and A/B testing are really ways of highly optimizing your pages. They won't really take you from 0-60 but instead maybe something like 87-100. Very large volume traffic, with very well run tests. Otherwise, it's sort of like shuffling papers. You can really gain a lot before doing A/B testing, IMO.

Sean, your best bet is to get your sites and SEO under one roof. Hiring an outside SEO company will be challenging because they do not have technical control over the website and will ask the website vendor for changes that won't be implemented. If you're happy with the sites and would like to create separate marketing sites, then going with an outside company may be beneficial and you may get some more attention from them.

Unfortunately Chris is correct: We can't get half of the stuff that you want but not just because the vendor doesn't want to do it but because 98% of the dealers out there either don't care about this magic we sell or they care but they don't understand it anyway. The scope of work is tremendous but the reward is very little. I would adventure to say that half of the guys reading this will agree that they could work and use this stuff but they would even have a hard time selling the idea of the investment of time and money to their own dealer principals. So as a vendor why offer something few people would care to use or understand?

I go to many dealers where I show website systems that do 2o things their current systems don't do (like having rebates on new cars, on page SEO, content builders, etc) and their answer is: "but I pay $499 for my website", indeed you do and indeed we knew coming in your website was $499. Then they turn around and spend $20K on a 1-month mailer. The car business has not yet embraced digital, the Dealer refresh community is unique and unheard in the mainstream of the dealer body.

I disagree with Chris (and let me say that I find him to have a lot of common sense moist of the time) with having website and SEO under one roof most-of-the-time. If for SEO you mean on page SEO, site optimization, etc I would say yes right away. If you also add external digital assets like blogs, content management, microsites (digital assets in general) I would say no because most website companies are not geared financially to build these low profit assets so they either don;t do them or they usually do a poor job.

 

[Chris Cachor]

I disagree with Chris (and let me say that I find him to have a lot of common sense moist of the time) with having website and SEO under one roof most-of-the-time. If for SEO you mean on page SEO, site optimization, etc I would say yes right away. If you also add external digital assets like blogs, content management, microsites (digital assets in general) I would say no because most website companies are not geared financially to build these low profit assets so they either don;t do them or they usually do a poor job.

Yes, I meant if an outside company wants to make changes to the vendor site that require code changes, etc. Web vendors have their way of doing it, while an outside company will want to try another method, but the outside companies hands are tied cause they can't modify the CMS. Outside of that, micro-sites and other lead-gen sites I have no problem recommending hiring out services to someone more specialized.

 

[AutomoSEO]

Conversion Rate Optimization can surely be done on most vendors. I've done it on Dealer.com sites and they are one of the most limited as far as any kind of advanced implementations.

It basically consists of using custom filters and advanced segments in Google Analytics to capture everything about how each visitor is interacting with your site when they either open a contact form, then close it or open it and fill it out. This also includes every visitor who clicks on any call-to-action on the site and then either close it off or submit it. You combine this data with bounce rates, time on page and a few other things, which ultimately give you a pretty crystal clear picture as to areas where you need to re-design, re-format or change the placement of your CTA's and also any problems with your contact form such as unnecessary fields, too many *required* fields, poor wording and ordering of fields.

You then basically change little things here and there and see how the data reacts. So any site that will allow Google Analytics and basic HTML modifications is CRO-able.

However, you are entirely correct in saying that SEO is very limited with a lot of vendors. Anything that requires changing the code is a no-no. Big things I've ran into were with the site architecture, page extensions and setting up things like canonical tags.

Dealer.com has those pages where it might be something like http://www.website.com/new-inventory/index.htm ... and no matter what you put after index.htm it still works, such as "http://www.website.com/new-inventory/index.htm?hello" or
"http://www.website.com/new-inventory/index.htm?howyadoin" etc. they are all leading to the same page. The problem is after a while, Google indexes several of these URLs and to Google, they are all separate pages with duplicate content and this is BAD. The canonical tag tells Google, "hey, http://www.website.com/new-inventory/index.htm is the main page, so don't count those other ones as individual pages."

A giant reason I started my business is because if dealers don't start addressing SEO seriously and moving to vendors that allow them the flexibility to do so - they will seriously find themselves being DE-INDEXED from Google, straight up. I've seen it happen from the Penguin update and that is nothing compared to the lengths they are going to go in the future to stop people from gaming the system. My partner built websites for one of the biggest tech companies in the auto-biz for 10 years and my plan is to eventually start getting dealers switched over so we can do their SEO, their websites and everything all in one spot with one clear strategy and it will be highly effective - I just hope they start opening their minds a bit and allow capable people with good intentions to help them.