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Knowledge, news, and more about Automotive SEO, SEM, and dealership websites
In Search Engine Marketing (PPC)

Is Your Dealership Taking Advantage of Google’s Mobile Ads?

It is almost hard to comprehend how fast mobile Internet usage is growing.  According to Google, more smartphones were sold last year than PCs.  It’s predicted that 50% of Americans will have a smartphone by the end of the year and that there will be 10 billion mobile Internet devices in 2012, up from the 2 billion that are activated today.  A child is more likely to own a cell phone than a book!

How is that going to impact the car buying experience and your online strategy?  With 51% of mobile car shoppers using search engines to research their next vehicle purchase, it’s extremely important that your dealership has a well-optimized mobile site and a well thought-out mobile marketing strategy.  One tactic your dealership may want to consider is using Google Mobile Ads to target mobile web users with pay per click (PPC) ads.

In addition to the regular PPC ads that you’re running (which can be viewed by mobile users on full-browser devices), you can use the Google Mobile Ads to target mobile phone customers who don’t have full-browsers on their smartphones.  Google has reported that advertisers using a mobile-only AdWords campaign, designed to target mobile customers who don’t have full-browser devices, can increase click-through rates by 11.5%.

Mobile Ads also allow you to have a separate keyword list than your normal AdWords campaigns, so you can tailor your keyword lists to the shorter keywords this type of mobile web searchers tend to use.  Remember that if you’re going to run mobile ads on Google, you have to use a mobile website landing page—it’s not just a best practice, it’s a requirement.

Has anyone adopted any mobile strategies that they’ve found to be particularly effective or any that have proven not to be?

In Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Tips for Car Dealers Taking a Fresh Look at Your SEO

The process of maximizing the amount of traffic and leads that your website generates from Google can be daunting.  Here are some basic things that our SEO team at DealerOn recommends focusing on if you are either changing website providers, contracting with a SEO or PPC vendor, or simply taking the pulse of the performance of your site and marketing efforts.

Determine Which Keywords You Should be Targeting – Working with your vendors, develop a list of which keywords your dealership is targeting and which ones you should be targeting.  Make sure to analyze your web analytics so that you don’t miss any important keywords that are already generating traffic and leads.  Also, use available free resources (see my post on Free Online Tools for dealers) that can provide further keyword discovery (including Google’s Keyword Tool, Spyfu, Compete.com).

Determine Your Baseline – After you have your keyword lists, you should develop a historical baseline for your list.  For each important keyword, track traffic volumes and website lead volumes.  Ideally, you should also run a dealership SEO report card every quarter or so.  If you’re going to hire a company to drive traffic to your website, either via SEO or PPC, you should know your starting point so you can measure the value that your vendor is providing in incremental traffic and leads.

Use Website Analytics – Search engine rankings are worthless if they don’t translate into traffic, so make sure you know which keywords are actually driving traffic to your site.  Compare this list with your targeted keywords to see how effective/worthwhile your efforts are and have been.  For example, if you’re ranked #1 for a keyword but that keyword isn’t driving any traffic to your site, it’s time to rethink your strategy.

Check PPC Landing Pages and Micro-Sites – Even though you may not think of these sites as part of your SEO strategy, they should be.  While maintaining a focus on conversion, make sure any content and the structure of the page is done with SEO in mind, even if the primary reason you’ve created the content is not organic search.

Meet with Vendors – You may have several parties (website provider, PPC provider, SEO vendor, digital agency, etc) involved with your search engine strategies.  You should have periodic reviews with all of them (even have group meetings together) about how you can continue to improve and evolve your search marketing efforts.  Doing your research beforehand allows you to work with, and push, your vendors to get the most value possible for your dealership.

What other tips do you have for someone that wants to take a fresh look at the SEO efforts on their car dealership website?  Where did you start on your site?

In Dealership Websites

Free Web Tools for Car Dealership Websites

In a follow-up comment to a post I wrote last week about social media web tools, Jared Hamilton asked me about other free tools I’d recommend for dealers and internet managers to be as effective as possible in their daily marketing efforts.  Below are some tools that various team members at DealerOn use or have used in the past.

Compete.com –By entering your website and those of your competitors, you can see site traffic history, competitive analytics, and your “Compete Rank”, a stat based on unique visitors.

Quantcast.com — Similar information to Compete.com, Quantcast gives you another site to triangulate on information about your website, your visitors, and your competitors’ website visitors.

Spyfu.com – Not free, but they provide a free trial, and if you find it useful, it’s fairly cheap.  Spyfu provides information about your competitors keywords (organic and paid), ad copy, and spend levels.  The data isn’t perfect, but it’s interesting and helpful.

Website Grader–This is similar to Compete.com, providing information on various aspects of your site (metadata, readability level, indexed pages, linking domains, etc), and ways you can improve your website’s score.

Google Keyword Tool–This well-known tool allows you to see how many searches are done on a keyword, as well as related terms.  It’s a good, basic way to help start your keyword research for your website.  It also serves as a keyword discovery tool–providing additional keyword suggestions, that Google views as similar to the keywords you provide.

Google Webmaster Tools–Get the most out of your website by seeing how Google sees your site, get information about internal and external links, and make sure Google has your sitemap.

Google Analytics–I recently wrote a post about the importance of incorporating this analytics tool on your dealership site.  There’s absolutely no good reason not to have it, its free, and even if you don’t check it but every few months, getting your site coded today, will mean that 2 months from now, you haveenough data to actually draw some conclusions about your site and your traffic.

Google Alerts–At a minimum, your dealership should be tracking when your employee’s names, dealership name, and competitors’ brand names are mentioned online.  Results are delivered to your email inbox.

Backlink Checker–By simply entering your URL, you can find out how many backlinks Yahoo, Bing, and Google have to your site.  You can click onto the results to see which sites are linking to your website.  This is a useful stat to keep an eye on–if there is a sudden increase or decrease, you’ll want to find out why.

If you have any questions about how best to use these or other free web tools, feel free to contact DealerOn at clientresults@dealeron.com.  Are there are any other free web tools that your dealership uses?  Please share below.

In

Social Media Time Savers for Car Dealers

When I’m talking with dealers about various aspects of their online marketing strategy, the reason that they most frequently bring up for why they aren’t more involved in social media is that they or their teams don’t have the time.  I’m a strong believer in the theory that time is the new money, so I agree that sometimes there just aren’t enough hours in the day.  At DealerOn, we believe that there is a definite benefit to devoting time and effort to social media, and luckily, there are many tools that can help your dealership get the most out of your time.

SocialOomph: I use this to help with DealerOn’s tweets and Facebook marketing efforts.  I recommend the Professional version (it’s very reasonably priced) to schedule and track tweets and Facebook posts, as well as manage your accounts.  Having a single login and platform to manage all of these activities is a HUGE time-saver.

Tweetdeck: I know a lot of people that love this tool.  Anyone dipping their toe into social media will like that it’s free, and allows you to manage multiple social media profiles (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, Google Buzz, and Foursquare) in one place.  It also has a great search tool that works across all the platforms they support.

Timely.is:  This is another free tool.  The software analyzes your Twitter updates, uses this information to determine which times during the day people are most likely to retweet and read your posts, and allows you to write and schedule your tweets based on their recommendations for maximum exposure.

I’m always looking for more efficient ways to manage my time.  Does anyone have any other or better social media tools that they recommend?

In Web Analytics

Is Your Car Dealership Using the Latest Google Analytics Code?

In addition to rolling out Google+ and the Google +1 button, Google has also recently rolled out a new version of Google Analytics.  Google Analytics 5 includes a complete user interface re-design which allows users to create multiple dashboards, more easily search across multiple accounts, create custom reports (and goals), and Analytics Intelligence, a tool that allows for automatic alerts.

One of the more exciting new features of Google Analytics 5 is the ability to track Google +1 clicks.  To get this functionality on your site, you need to make sure you are using the updated tracking code.  If you’ve recently added Google Analytics to your site, you should have the right code.  If not, make sure when you sign into your Google Analytics account, you’re using the “New Version”.  If your page looks like this:

you aren’t.  So click “New Version” and you’re set.

Now, click the Gear icon in the orange toolbar.  Click “Tracking Code” and you’ll have the latest version of the code for your site.

Make sure that when you put the code on your site you get it before the closing of the </head> tag of your HTML file.

It’s important to make sure your dealership website has this updated Google Analytics code on your site, so check with your dealer site provider to make sure they’ve added them.  If you have any questions beyond that, feel free to contact DealerOn at clientresults@dealeron.com and check out our post from last week on how to get Google Analytics on your dealership website.

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