by JD Rucker on August 22, 2010
If a car dealer were to buy every product out there that offered ways to increase their leads, they would spend hundreds of thousands of dollars per month – and that’s if they only tried the “good” ones.
The truth is that there are hundreds of products and variations within these products and services that are intended to help gain exposure for car dealers. The automotive industry is one that has so many options, it’s challenging to know what is a must, what is optional, and what just won’t work.
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by JD Rucker on August 17, 2010
With the emergence of automotive social media, the resurgence of PPC, and the growing trend towards understanding analytics, it would be easy to say that SEO is starting to take a backseat to its “sexier” automotive marketing counterparts. This, of course, would be a mistake.
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by JD Rucker on July 31, 2010
(This article originally appeared in the August, 2010 Issue of AutoDealerMonthly)
When the topic of Inventory Management is brought up to car dealers, certain things always come to mind. How should it be priced? How often is it updated? How many pictures should you take?
While these are all important, one aspect that is regularly forgotten is how to drive the right traffic to the specific vehicles that people want to buy. Some would say that PPC advertising is the way to go, and that can definitely be effective if you have the extra budget, but today we’re going to talk about the proper optimization techniques that will drive your inventory to the top of the search engines organically. [click to continue…]
by rvalenta on July 22, 2010
Google is constantly developing new technologies and methodologies for staying ahead of the curve in search. One possible method that Google’s considering to manipulate search results is applying a user’s pointer activity as a ranking variable.
While it’s probably something that most of us do without even realizing it, hovering over what you’re viewing on a Web page with your cursor is an extremely common user behavior. Google describes this behavior in a recently granted patent as follows: [click to continue…]
by rvalenta on July 1, 2010
This is a common question I hear from Internet managers. The answer is YES! However, the real question should be “If I am going to SEO myself, how much time do I need to put in?” The answer to this question all depends on how competitive your market area is and how experienced you are at SEO. Therefore, the answer is: The less experience you have, the more time you will spend.
As stated in my webinar “From Search to Sold”, SEO is a series of processes repeated over and over with no end. I did not get into site structure and code, which are very important, as I believe most systems used today in the automotive industry have this covered. I also did not get into link structure which will take some research to make sure you have a sound method for interlinking the pages within your site. Bottom line is, if you follow solid processes, you should be able to adequately optimize your site and grow your traffic over time. You will also figure out in about 30 days how much time you need to spend each month optimizing your site.
Now for the hard part…
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by rvalenta on June 11, 2010
I recently started doing some research into automotive SEO today and came across a dealer website where there were literally hundreds of keywords stuffed into the content on the home page. As I went deeper into the site, I noticed that the Title tags and descriptions were all the same and there was no additional content anywhere on this site. It’s almost as if this dealer is not aware that Google indexes each page separately. Not to mention that keyword stuffing does not work and a single page will never rank for hundreds of keywords.
The key to good SEO is to treat each page as it’s own entity. Here is a quote from Google Webmaster Central “Googlebot processes each of the pages it crawls in order to compile a massive index of all the words it sees and their location on each page. In addition, we process information included in key content tags and attributes, such as Title tags and ALT attributes.” [click to continue…]
by David Lux on May 27, 2010
Blogging has become a must for nearly every business, but keeping the content flowing is one of the biggest challenges faced by new bloggers. A blog by its very definition is a intended to have regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other content, which means that if you’re not feeding it new posts, you’re letting it go to waste.
Whether you’re considering starting a blog for your dealership, or if you looking for ways to improve your existing blog, check out these simple tips to keep the content flowing. [click to continue…]
by TK Productions on May 21, 2010
Learn 5 steps to turn Automotive SEO into sales. JD Rucker, Director of Digital Marketing, and Richard Valenta, CEO, teach processes that dealers can use to optimize their own websites. The processes cover key points from keyword research to conversion techniques.
TK Carsites has been doing Automotive SEO for 7 years and this is the first time we have shared our processes with the public. We believe that a sound process will build results for years to come.
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by JD Rucker on May 5, 2010
Car buyers use the Internet as much as possible when they enter the market. Over 75% start their research online. Most of those who start there finish there IF they find what they are looking for. The only thing that keeps this from being over 90% is that most car dealers are not marketing their products and services properly. That is where TK Carsites comes in.
Automotive Advertising on the Internet goes beyond dealer search engine optimization (SEO) or auto search engine marketing (SEM). While most people are using search engines such as Google to find what they need, there are other untapped areas where automotive marketing is important. For car dealers, search engines can be their best tool or worst enemy. Car marketing is tough. We make it simple.
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