» SEO

Today I wanted to give you some insights into the investigations I have been making into Automotive Dealer web marketing efforts. Even if you are not in that market, you might get some ideas for how you can improve your own campaigns.

When you look around the web at any field in business there are often common mistakes, either because “that is the way things are done in our industry” or because everyone copies each other. Do not parrot a flawed model, optimize your web experience for customers so that they are more inclined to go with you rather than every other clone out there!

1. Go commodity - The biggest mistake I see car dealers make on the web is an over emphasis on commodity features. What do I mean? Focus on price, or information every other dealer has. Where is the differentiation? This is the web, we can’t assume our website is the only one the visitor will read today! Provide a reason why the visitor should choose you over any of your competitors.
2. Me-Me-Me – You know what? The visitor is not that interested in your CEO/MD/Sales team. Customers want some information, to feel a sense of trust and confidence, but when it is all about you then the visitor is turned off. Tune in to what the customer needs and wants to know, and get out of the way.
3. “Check book marketing” – When I look at a lot of automotive company websites it is obvious that someone has opened their bank account to an agency and said “just make it happen”. Stale website, expensive non-optimized advertising, and me-too approaches. Most good agencies want to collaborate to make campaigns a success, make sure your agency emphasizes what makes you different and better rather than take the easy cookie-cutter approach that does not get results.
4. Lack of engagement – Rather than put your customer at arms length you need to invite them in, get them to interact, invite questions, and know that you are responsive and have a customer-focus. This is like sampling your customer service before purchase, and also great for keeping customers around longer term. Even something as simple as a newsletter can start the process. Out of sight, out of mind!
5. Rush – It is unlikely that a visitor is going to make a purchase the first time they see your site, so why are so many of these websites in a rush to get you out of the “door”? You need to hold interest and not be so eager. The customer could be at any point in the buying cycle from initial research to price comparison, so you need to be sensitive to these needs and help and encourage rather than push.

I think the root cause of most of these issues come down to

• Partial abdication of responsibility – You want a good job but do not feel you can get very involved in the process. In fact, you need to be involved because it is you that is being represented. The experience of your website will directly impact how your customers feel about you.
• Outbound thinking - By prioritizing what you want to say rather than what you want the visitor to experience you set yourself up to be a blowhard rather than a good salesperson. The best in sales are listeners first, remember that and you will not go far wrong.
• Building a fixed brochure – Websites can be so much more than brochures. Plus everything is measurable and can be continually optimized. Do not settle for mediocre, be constantly looking to improve and grow.

Thankfully all of these issues are easy to start fixing today, and they all start with your prospect. The more you can focus on pleasing and catering to your potential customers wants and needs the more you are going to give that positive impression you need in order to be competitive and make more sales!

A very simple yet effective Search Engine Optimization (SEO) technique that I always recommend to my clients is to start out with a small Pay Per Click (PPC) campaign to measure the keyword effectiveness and then move onto SEO.  There are so many SEO consulting firms out there that focus purely on keyword traffic and I’ve never understood this approach.  The same rules that apply to an effective Search Engine Marketing (SEM) campaign should apply to a SEO strategy.

I guess the big question is, do you want traffic or conversions?  I’m curious to hear your thoughts on this.

The other supporting argument for this approach is that its a lot faster and efficient to A/B test a SEM campaign versus a SEO campaign.  How are you going to know what conversion funnel works the best?  Wait months for the SEO efforts to pay off?

Some folks just don’t want to spend the money on PPC.  I know that the ROI would be a lot better and its short sighted not to make a small investment up front on PPC.  So be smart, start with PPC and then transition to SEO or else you’ll find yourself at a dead end.

TechCrunch featured a company called InLinks.com yesterday and referred to it as “hard to detect”, as in the world of blackhat SEO.  I’m not so sure about that one.  Let’s face it, the folks at Google are pretty smart.  It took me a few minutes and I quickly discovered some of the publishers by performing a few simple Google searches.  Here are just a few of the publishers I discovered: The Hunters Mark, Krimson News, TheRandToday.com,  Stephan Miller and Peer1.  Michael Arrington, are you telling us Google can’t do this?

I think that building a business model based on what is considered a violation of Google’s terms wasn’t the smartest idea by New York-based advertising firm MediaWhiz.  Matt Cutts, Google’s SEO guru, specifically states on his blog, “Google has been very clear that selling such links that pass PageRank is a violation of our quality guidelines.”

There’s a lot of talk about this in the new media industry.  Olgivy commented that appearing on TechCrunch is normally a good thing – but not this time.

My advice, stay away!  Don’t touch this one with a ten foot pole whether your an advertiser or a publisher!

UPDATE:  The Hunters Mark posted a comment below today in regards to this post.  InLinks.com had an excerpt from their blog which when searched on Google was the only result which lead me to believe that either InLinks.com is using thier blog as an example or the Hunters Mark actually did act as a publisher on their behalf.  Either way, our agency tries to encourage best seo practices and found Inlinks.com business model unethical on many levels.  If the Hunters Mark was never a part of it, I apologize for the inacuracy, however, I can assure you that we did research this thoroughly.