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BlogPro Automotive

BlogPro Automotive
Automotive Web Marketing 2.0 ...Blog, Podcast, RSS, Behavioral, and Search Marketing for Auto Dealers

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Articles: 1, 2, 3

Articles

Search marketing is not lead generation
2007-10-30 17:43:00
Most people equate the term Search Engine Optimization to Organic Search, however SEO has evolved in a not-so-obvious way it seems. If you think about it, SEO is more specifically about “optimizing” your Search Engine Marketing strategy as a whole, not just your organic search efforts. In other words, SEO is a form of SEM, but it is not necessarily limited to just Organic Search. How important is it to get these terms straight? Hard to say, but probably important. For years, car dealers and automotive marketing providers have misused the term Search Engine Marketing as specific to Pay-Per-Click Advertising and the net result has been a complete misuse of Search Marketing all together. Because of PPC and 3rd-party automotive sites, dealers look at search marketing as a lead generator whereas there is much more to search marketing than generating leads. Search Marketing is about brand awareness, market positioning, and search engine visibility. Similar to conventional adve...
More About: Generation , Lead

Quality content is fresh fruit
2007-10-29 06:04:00
With Organic Search Marketing, quality content plays a vital role. In the early days of organic search, companies only needed to focus on meta tags and information to attain visibility on search engines. Today however, while content on the optimized pages are now essential, so too is content elsewhere on the Web. Most company sites can not be updated on a regular basis, nor should they be as the sites are designed to be showcases of a company’s products and services. Therefore, updating the static content on your site is not a practical means of providing fresh, unique, quality content on a regular basis. Blog software on the other hand is designed for this. Blog software is nothing more than scaled down CMS software designed for fresh new content to be posted each day in a journal style format, just like you see here in this blog. In your company blog, you can post the same message each day, multiple times a day even, and develop rewarding relationships with search engines by...
More About: Fruit , Content , Fresh , Quality , Tent

The misnomer of online advertising
2007-10-26 06:28:00
Auto shoppers are known to hit the Internet today when beginning their quest to find a vehicle. But with so many thousands of places for them to go, getting lost, confused, or at least overwhelmed is not uncommon. This makes Organic Search Marketing all that more important. While the advantage that has been gained in recent years by auto shoppers with the Internet age has been the increase in available information and a decrease in the negotiating power of dealers, the prices to pay are too much information and too many hoops to jump, and dealers are paying for it. 15 years ago, dealers competed locally with their counterparts through radio, television, and print ads which covered most consumer markets. These advertisements concentrated on the business and actual specials and would drive customers directly to the showroom. But with the Internet, these consumer markets have been diluted to the Web, so there is less market share off line and more online. This does not discredit the im...
More About: Advertising , Online Advertising , Online , Vert

Simplifying search marketing for car dealers
2007-10-25 18:38:00
When it comes to Automotive Search Marketing , one thing service providers often ignore is the fact that the big decision-makers at car dealerships do not spend their time actually engaged in search marketing. They typically occupy their time with helping the dealership close more deals. This can make the process of conveying the importance of search marketing a challenge. Last week in a presentation meeting with one of my clients, the GM showed up about 15 minutes after our scheduled time and was only partially focused on the gathering. However, he did not miss a beat when he noticed someone standing near the showroom possibly interested in a purchase. “Hold on,” he told us as he quickly captured the attention of one of the floor reps. “Is that a fresh up?” asked the GM. So how do you capture the minds of these decision makers about something as essential to their business as search marketing? Writing on key phrases such as “automotive seo” and &#...

Organic Search: Investment, not Expense
2007-10-24 06:36:00
There are thousands of people in your market seeking products, services, and information on the Web that are related to what you provide. Organ ic Search Marketing is a way to make your dealership more visible and accessible to these search markets while at the same time building your brand and attaining more credibility with your audience. This is what separates Organic Search from other forms of marketing as an INVESTMENT, rather than an advertising expense. A “search market” is a concentration of Internet users seeking specific products, services, or information by entering in select keywords or key phrases into the major search engines (Google, MSN, Yahoo!, etc.). By “organic” we are referring specifically to the 10 listings which appear on each search engine result page (SERP) and not the sponsored, or pay-per-click (PPC), ads that often appear above and to the side of these results. Unlike the expense of PPC advertising where your ads appear instantly fr...
More About: Investment

Search Market Positioning
2007-10-23 06:16:00
The glory of organic search marketing is in attaining visibility with the search engines, but the end goal should be to position your business in search markets that create profit for you, not just visibility. It is not difficult to appear in search markets that return little or no reward. With increased search visibility, businesses are able to tap in to search markets that have the potential to generate significant business for their organizations. For car dealers however, the road to attain this positioning can be a painful wait because many dealers want immediate results. Pay-per-click advertising can ease the pain a bit. PPC gives dealers the opportunity to appear instantly in searches for markets in which they want to be seen and thus generate instant site traffic. But acquisition of sponsored ads does not necessarily equate to marketing positioning. You can purchase PPC ads all day long and get people to click on them, but if Internet users do not see what they are expecting ...
More About: Market , Search , Positioning , Position

Organic search is like a money market account
2007-10-22 07:46:00
Organic Search Market ing is the idea of using SEO to exploit organic search markets on the Web for your dealership. A “search market” is a concentration of Internet users seeking specific products, services, or information by entering in select keywords or key phrases into the major search engines (Google, MSN, Yahoo!, etc.). By “organic” we are referring specifically to the 10 listings which appear on each search engine result page (SERP) and not the sponsored, or pay-per-click (PPC) ads that often appear above and to the side of these results. Unlike the expense of PPC advertising where your ads appear instantly from the time you initiate the campaign and only when there is an exact match to the key phrase you purchase, success in Organic Search Marketing takes time to achieve. However, the result can produce a much greater return, primarily because Organic Search Marketing is an investment, not an expense. The things required to produce results in Organic ...
More About: Money , Money Market , Organic

Full-service blog marketing for car dealers
2007-10-20 03:38:00
The highest priority for auto dealers of course is to sell and service vehicles. This requires personnel to handle things such as managing and qualifying leads, closing deals, upgrading finance packages, delivering vehicles, maintaining an effective CRM process, and running a service department. All things that are typically done in-house with trained personnel. But some functions, such as blog marketing, can and should be farmed out to expert professionals. Since automotive blog marketing is in its infancy, dealers should be outsourcing this part of their business so they can reap the benefits of blog marketing without being required to train, educate, and manage personnel on this complex form of search marketing. Blog marketing requires time and expertise that is a distraction for dealership personnel. The industry knowledge has not yet accumulated and the tools for automotive blogging have not matured yet to make this a feasible internal business function inside the dealership. ...
More About: Marketing , Service , Blog Marketing , Full

The importance of Tagging
2007-10-19 03:11:00
Producing content for websites and blogs is not a difficult thing to do. Especially since it can be outsourced at a relatively low cost. But while content is king when it comes to SEO, there is another important element with which to consider…TAGGING. Tagging in this context is in regards to things such as title tags, alt tags, and keyword tags, or as which appear at the bottom of each entry on this blog, Technorati Tags. But tagging is not limited to just these criteria. Read this article for more fodder about the depths of tagging. How you tag the information in your blogs plays a vital role in your SEO success. I learned this the hard way recently by re-tagging more than 2 weeks of published content. The end result is that my client’s landing page went from position 11 on Google to being completely disregarded. I suspect that my message to Google was, “I am confused”. This begs the question of whether or not is is it better to re-optimize and re-tag alread...

Mixed signals from automotive content syndicator
2007-10-18 03:40:00
Three articles this past week published by AutoRemarketing are giving seemingly mixed messages. Oct 18 - Traditional Media More Productive than Online? Oct 16 - Dealer Web Sites To Take Higher Priority Oct 11 - Automakers Reaping Results of Investing Online The first article talks about how some research performed by a company showed that conversion rates for business generated online were lower than the conversion rates of business generated through traditional advertising. But there are some loopholes in the representation of this information. For one, the research (or maybe just the article referencing the research) is bundling in all forms of traditional advertising against Internet advertising. If you extract radio advertising from the former and replace it with Internet advertising, then theoretically the headline could read, “Traditional Media More Productive than Radio?” There are other loopholes, but the point is that there is some misrepresentation. It should...
More About: Automotive , Content , Mixed , Tent , Mixe

Where PPC falls short and how blogging fills that gap
2007-10-16 06:24:00
When dealers evaluate the purchase of goods and services, they do as any intelligent business would do and consider the ROI. With online retail today in the automotive marketplace, ROI is typically measured on a cost-per basis, e.g. cost-per-lead, cost-per-click, cost-per-sale, etc. While these certainly are useful ways to measure ROI, I have become skeptical of how this information is assessed and leveraged by dealers. For many years dealers have been able to know their per-vehicle cost-per-sale. But with today’s Internet technologies, there are other cost-per ratios that can be measured. Search engine marketing itself has introduced tremendous new methods for dealers to track and measure where specific portions of their marketing dollars go. But search engine marketing is a complex practice that I think benefits the search engine companies more than anything. As SEM methodologies mature and the market grows smarter and more competitive, the cost for effective SEM campaigns ...
More About: Blogging , Short , Falls

Pros and cons of SEO and PPC
2007-10-15 06:02:00
SEM company Axandra recently explained the advantages and disadvantages of SEO vs. PPC. You will see upon reading this the consistent theme that SEO is less expensive in capital and has a much better residual benefit, which, as far as I am concerned is smarter business. I think that PPC is over-rated right now and will be forced to evolve into a more viable marketing investment as PPC costs continue to increase. The main challenge to successful SEO results is time, relevancy, and website optimization which are things that effective RSS marketing can accomplish in a cost-effective manner by the way. Here is what they have to say: Pay per click advertising (PPC) Advantages: * You get instant results. If you advertise your website on pay per click search engines, then you will get traffic now and not several months later. * PPC ads are perfect for time limited offers such as holiday sales. * You can stop PPC ads at any time. * PPC ads make it easy to test different keywords and landing...
More About: Cons

How car dealers can use Twitter to sell cars
2007-10-12 06:27:00
Last week I began using Twitter after reading posts about it on DealerRefresh and Publishing 2.0. Twitter is a unique Web 2.0 service that has been around since March 2006. The idea behind it is that you can post extremely short messages, literally 140 characters max, that can be emailed or text messaged to those following you. All you do once you have your own profile is visit the Twitter home page, enter your short message, and voilà, it will appear in the inboxes and cell phones of your followers. Additionally, anyone can visit your Twitter page and see all of the entries you made. For example, click here to see my Twitter page which I only recently began using. Twitter has a page rank of 7 right now which indicates a tremendous amount of traffic to the site (in addition to good indexing). I would suspect that the people using Twitter are what I call Internet power users, i.e. people that blog, run blogs, run social networks, and frequent discussion forums. The question to ask t...
More About: Cars , Sell

Search engine basics and its evolution
2007-10-12 05:50:00
Searching for information on the Internet is a peculiar experience. Much like real life, it seems that the more you do it the more you realize you do not know, but once you understand some basics, searching the elusive ether web can be a rewarding experience…well, almost. There is so much information on the Web today that it is almost impossible to locate all of the quality information available to you on a particular subject. While this post might be elementary for some readers, our hope is that this fundamental practice can be explored in greater depth on this blog through a series of entries and comments about Internet search, search marketing, and marketing communication. Pre-Web Search Internet search is a changed science today. In the pre-Web days, bulletins were assuredly the most common way for people to keep up with their interests as well as to collaborate. Users could subscribe to newsgroups and information on the net was readily and easily available if you knew how...
More About: Evolution , Search , Search Engine , Engine , Basics

Preparing an effective SEO strategy
2007-10-11 05:45:00
When you perform a search on Google, or Yahoo!, or wherever, what do you look for in the results? Some people only pay attention to PPC ads, some only pay attention to the organic listings, and some pay attention to both. Some people only look on the first page of results and some look at pages 2, 3, and beyond. Some people only notice the page titles while others only take note of the domains, extended URLs, and the tiny descriptions that often appear in each result entry. There is a lot of information that displays in search results and each of us looks for something different. So how should companies approach the way their information is presented in search results? Before this can be answered, you first must consider your audience. If your audience is Web-savvy then you might need to focus on your page titles. If your audience is search-savvy then you might need to make sure you appear on multiple pages of listings. If your audience is looking for the quickest and the cheapest t...
More About: Strategy , Effective , Prep

Ford Dealer SEO analysis
2007-10-10 05:37:00
When it comes to automotive SEO, dealers today have a variety of choices. While most automotive website providers today include or at least offer some sort of SEO service, companies like Clickmotive, Real Traffic Productions, and Jumpstart Media specialize in it. But how do the SEO services these companies provide stack up against each other and how do they stack up against non-automotive SEO companies? This is a tough question to answer without performing a J.D. Power-level assessment, but one good way to determine the effectiveness of a company’s SEO service is to see which dealers show up in the SERPs. When I search for “auto dealers” or “car dealers” on Google I am not seeing a single dealer website appear in the top 5 SERPs. I do see several results linking to the auto dealers sections of their sites, or car dealer directories. In my experience however, I have found most of these directories limited and not particularly useful. Now when I narrow do...
More About: Ford , Analysis , Dealer , Anal

Relational marketing-purposed blogs not realistic yet for auto dealers
2007-10-09 04:07:00
An article by Gary Nixon of CIMA systems recently published on IMedia Connection provides some useful statistics and insights about auto dealer blogs and the consumer market. […]16 percent used interactive marketing in the form of blogs or discussion groups and more than 20 percent of respondents between 18-34 years of age used web groups and social forums when compiling information [for shopping autos]. The key points in his message are: Newsletters are declining in their effectiveness Blogs fill that gap Blogs should be used for relational marketing purposes The term “relational” marketing was not used specifically in Gary’s article, but that is essentially what he was driving at. Read the first paragraph in the section labeled, “It has to inspire feedback “. He states, […]dealers that are taking full advantage of technology are the ones who are blogging about their own thoughts, theories and opinions of the vehicles on their lot and the...
More About: Marketing , Auto , Realistic

Evolution 3
2007-09-22 07:39:00
This blog is being phased out. Please visit our new blog located at http://blog.autoconversion.net. After one year of service we have determined to do most activities under the AutoConversion brand. You may visit our Google Group located at www.autoconversion.net for more information. Thank you for your interest, support, and patronage. We will likely keep this blog up ...
More About: Evolution

YouTube video advertising
2007-09-20 15:30:00
While this video ad does not reflect my taste in advertising, I do give kudos to Big Bob’s Used Car Lot for utilizing YouTube for advertising purposes. If, in fact, this is even an ad for a real dealer. There are signs this is more a spoof than a real dealer ad. However, dealers posting their ...
More About: Video , Videos , Youtube , Tools , Advertising

Residual SEM maximizes your investment
2007-09-17 16:28:00
When performing searches on the Web through the major search engines, these engines strive to present you with links to sites and pages with content relevant to the keywords and phrases you enter. While fresh content is important to the engines, so too is relevancy and popularity. Content that has been around for a while and ...
More About: Investment , Tips , Residual , Maxi , Dual

Risk, Adventure, Opportunity, and the Unknown
2007-09-14 06:34:00
It has been a full year now since this blog was launched, one of the first few in our industry. In this time we have seen dozens of others sprout, including some dealer blogs too. A year ago there were probably half a dozen auto industry blogs and even fewer that actually posted regularly and ...
More About: Personal , Adventure , Blogging , Auto , Opportunity

Optimized copy for PPC ads
2007-09-11 16:46:00
Came across an informative video about optimizing PPC ads. The video was produced by Traffick.com and featured Mona Elesseily who just released her book on Mastering Panama which is a how-to guide on Yahoo! search marketing. The video is just more than 7 minutes in length but I have extracted the main talking points and ...
More About: Videos , Commentaries , Copy

Proof of concept
2007-09-06 19:36:00
A colleague prompted me the other day for proof of concept in how AutoBurst can help dealers saturate search markets. Dealers get a lot of hot air from companies today with promises on results and with something as new and foreign to automotive as RSS Marketing it is difficult to build confidence with so little ...
More About: Blog , Blogosphere , Proof , Concept

Proof of concept
2007-09-06 19:36:00
A colleague prompted me the other day for proof of concept in how Auto Burst can help dealers saturate search markets. Dealers get a lot of hot air from companies today with promises on results and with something as new and foreign to automotive as RSS Marketing it is difficult to build confidence with so little ...
More About: Blog Marketing , Proof , Concept

More articles from this author:
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