Search engine optimization in the automotive industry isn’t hard, which is why it surprises me how often companies choose to use shortcuts rather than to apply proven and acceptable white-hat techniques. It’s a problem that has been on the rise more in the last year than ever before. The reason for it is simple: true search engine optimization requires manual effort.

Large vendors prefer to avoid this because they feel it isn’t scalable. Smaller vendors scramble to assemble the manpower necessary to make it happen. It doesn’t have to be this way. It’s possible to perform search engine optimization at a scalable level that delivers real results for dealers. Identifying those who can bring you the results is as easy as answering five questions.

Before we get into the questions, it’s important to note one important omission from the list. You’ll notice that I did not include, “Do they have examples of dealers ranking well for challenging keywords?” If a vendor has more than a handful of clients, they will have examples of strong rankings. It’s inevitable. There are too many poorly optimized websites out there. A list of examples of clients who rank well is something that every vendor can provide. We’ve even seen occasions where websites that we have optimized on other website platforms are used as examples by that website provider.

Here are the questions that can truly help you make an educated decision.

Is Their Solution Centered Around Unique Content?

The Google Panda update of 2011 specifically attacked websites with duplicate and/or low-quality content. The automotive industry was not terribly harmed by this as most dealers have variations of “spun” content on their sites. Relative to other websites in the same realm, most dealerships are equally harmed by the lack of truly unique content, which means that the bar is set low to achieve higher rankings.

Vendors that do the same thing may not be hurt by this type of content, but they certainly aren’t helping. Building unique content pages on a monthly basis is a differentiator that only a handful of vendors utilize. Look at examples of their website SEO. Copy the first or second paragraph of the HTML content on the page. Paste that into Google and search. If you see a lot of websites that have the same basic content but with small changes such as the dealership name and city, you’ll know that their content is not unique enough to be a differentiator.

Do They Automate the SEO Process?

All of the old tricks of the trade are dead. Google and Bing have more brainpower behind fighting blackhat SEO than all of the blackhats combined. One of the worst potential offenses that both Google and Bing despise is automated SEO content.

There is no system today in or out of the automotive industry that can fool the search engines by generating pages based on actions from a feed. In other words, if a vendor is automating page creation by “spinning” content with different cities or models, they are going to be hurt by this practice. Some dealers have learned this lesson the hard way. This type of blackhat SEO isn’t just ineffective – it’s potentially dangerous.

Does Their Keyword Strategy Meet Your Individual Needs?

The most powerful SEO in the universe is worthless if the proper keywords are not targeted. The foundation of any strong SEO service is keyword selection and maintenance. It’s not just about picking out the right keywords in the beginning. It’s about enhancing the keyword selections based upon needs, changes in the industry, and expansion of the keyword reach.

Ask potential vendors to send you their onboarding or launch questions. This document should ask you what cities, new vehicle models, and used vehicle makes are most important to your dealership. There’s no way to put together a proper keyword strategy without having an understanding of the individual dealership’s competitive landscape. Only the dealer knows this information. Any vendor can make an educated guess, but you know your competition and opportunities better than anyone.

Do They Employ Inbound Link Strategies to Enhance Rankings?

Links are not dead. Automated and low-quality links are dead. That happened last April with the Penguin update when some dealers saw their rankings drop quickly.

Google and Bing both still give a lot of weight to inbound links. The difference now is that quality greatly trumps quantity. In fact, Google is making it detrimental to have low-quality links pointing to you. Employing a content-centric link-building system is the best way to make a positive impact on your search rankings. Without links, content alone does not have the power necessary to achieve the more challenging “money keywords” that are based on your make and/or model and city. You won’t be able to rank at the top for terms like “Milwaukee Chevrolet Dealers” with content alone.

Do They Rank Well With Their Own Sites?

A great chef cooks well at home as well as at the restaurant. It’s a shame that so many claim to have the best automotive SEO available without having the ability to get their own sites ranked for terms like “automotive SEO”. How does that make any sense?

Do some searches pertaining to keywords the prospective vendor would hold important. If they are truly good at SEO, they will certainly apply their techniques on their own websites. If they can’t get their own websites ranked well, how are they supposed to help their clients reach the top. After all, “automotive SEO” is a much more challenging keyword than “Milwaukee Chevrolet Dealers”.

Again, automotive SEO isn’t hard. It requires effort, proper strategies, and the ability to keep up with the rapid changes that are happening at Google and Bing. If you aren’t completely satisfied with your rankings, it’s time to find other options. Once you have those options gathered, ask these five questions. The answers will help you determine whether they’ll be able to get you higher rankings or if they’ll have your rankings tanking.

The other day I was in a meeting with a potential client. We were discussing automotive SEO best practices and the way that the search engines are changing the way they rank. We talked about the best ways a dealer can stay ahead of their competition for their current keywords while moving up in the competitive keywords in the area.

It was then that he made an interesting observation:

“I know that you keep on top of this stuff from a theoretical level, but I want to hear from the guy in the trenches that is actually doing the SEO for dealers.”

It was a great point. I’ve personally worked on the optimization for a couple dozen of our clients, but I’m not the guy that works on hundreds of dealers at a time. That guy is Ron Fortier, our SEO manager, so I posed the question to him. Here is what he put down as best practices for dealers, straight from the mouth of the guy leading the team that’s doing the work successfully…

Develop or Buy Tools that Help You Make Keyword Decisions Monthly

Priorities for your dealership change based on time of year, inventory levels, competition and conquest strategies. We are all resource constrained whether it be time or money, so we need tools that help us to make the best use of our investment in time. You need to have a tool or process that allows you to identify the most important keywords to work based on your monthly priorities.

Looking for more overall visitors? Your priority would be on keywords with larger impression counts. Looking to convert more of your visitors? Your priority would be on keywords that have high PPC costs and competition. Looking to conquest local dealers or make-model combinations? Your priority would be to view your rankings relative to your competitors. Want a great mix of all of the above? That is typically where we end up. Having a tool that helps you identify the best keywords to work based on your priorities allows you to spend 100% of your content and SEO efforts on tasks that are in line with your stores most immediate priorities.

Beware of Thin Content

Google rewards effort, plain and simple. Google’s quality rating guidelines are filled with how to identify low quality, useless content. Their best definition of spam is when you remove all of the template and spam elements from the page, there is nothing of any value remaining. If you are copying content from other sites, or slightly modifying keywords and thinking that you’re fooling Google, you’re not. Google rewards effort. Google rewards typing and content.

Low keyword counts may win here or there in the short run, but every change Google has made over the last 18 months has been an effort to remove thin, low quality pages from its index. Take the time to create content that is of value to a consumer when they get to a page and you won’t have to worry about the next animal-based update released from Google. Content is king and quality, useful content for consumers wins every time.

SEO Works Best in a Holistic Approach

Now that you’ve decided what to work with your time, be sure that all of your SEO efforts work in concert.

What content are you going to add to your site that works the keywords you’ve identified? What modifications will you be making to your website’s architecture and internal linking structure that signals to Google the significance of your content change? How will you support your keywords through offsite content and linking? What is your strategy to getting the content crawled and indexed quickly? If you only use one technique then you won’t be working all of the SEO signals and the effectiveness will be lessened. Does your content say one thing and your links another?

Sending mixed messages will also inhibit the effectiveness of your work. Take the time to ensure that all of your monthly SEO efforts are working in concert for maximum effectiveness.

Low Sales Funnel Keywords are Big though Small

Everyone wants to find that hidden keyword that will get them a thousand new visitors. We understand and often join the pursuit, but we also chase the keyword combos that will get you 5 visits a month. Insanity? No!

Many of these keywords are very low funnel or “right next to the money” as we like to say internally. Think of someone on a Friday night at 6:00 on Yelp searching restaurants. That search is right next to the money. That individual will eat tonight; they are just deciding where. The same thought applies to many keywords we go after. Consider a year make model search. They know what they’re going to buy. The only question is where and when. Don’t be afraid to mix in the low funnel keywords even though you know that they will be statistically insignificant in overall traffic volumes. That five visitor a month keyword could be the goose that lays the golden egg for years to come.

There’s a plethora of articles, tips, and techniques about automotive SEO that fill blogs, webinars, and training courses. Everyone has opinions about what works best and how to help dealers rank better in search. The biggest mistake that dealers (and their vendors) often make isn’t in the SEO techniques themselves but rather in the underlying keyword principles. It doesn’t matter how good the SEO techniques are; if you don’t have the right keywords selected from the start and make adjustments to the targets on a regular basis, your optimization is not optimal.

Here are some quick best practices to keep your keywords from going stagnant:

• When You Hit Your Goals, Move On – This is the most common keyword mistake in the automotive industry. I see dealers and their vendors pushing hard for keywords that they’re already dominating. They likely selected them from the beginning as high priority but never adjusted when they reached the top. If you’re ranked #1 for a keyword, no measure of additional SEO effort will get you ranked higher. Stop. Move your efforts to other keywords. Monitor it – if you fall from the top spot, re-engage with that keyword, but otherwise point your attentions to getting more keywords.
• Remember the Variations – So, you’re going after a keyword like “Shreveport Honda Dealer”. That’s great, but what about the others? Order of the words matter. Plural variations matter. Synonyms matter. You should be going after “Honda Dealer Shreveport”, “Shreveport Honda Dealership”, “Honda Dealers Shreveport LA”, etc.
• Rightsize Efforts Based on Competition Levels – You don’t need a rocket launcher to take down a rabbit. Likewise, a BB gun isn’t going to take down an elephant. Apply the right measure of SEO pressure on your selected keywords – no more, no less. As a general rule, the more words that are in the keyword phrase, the easier it is to get. For example, “Minneapolis Toyota” takes a lot of effort while “2013 Toyota Camry Minneapolis” takes less. Also, the competition level in a given metro makes a difference. Keywords for “Los Angeles CA” are easier than keywords for “Thousand Oaks CA”.
• Go for Top 5 for Some Keywords – There are certain keywords where the effort to get to #1 simply isn’t worth it. This is particularly true for keywords in cities where there is already a local dealership. If you’re in Palo Alto and you want to rank for keywords in San Jose, the chances of beating actual San Jose dealers is low, but getting into the top 5 is usually achievable. Set your expectations properly and focus on getting more keywords rather than moving up a little higher for competitive keywords.

These are just a handful of best practices, but the underlying lesson is clear. Watch your keywords. Adjust them. You or your vendor should be adjusting your SEO monthly based upon where you rank for your keywords. If you let your keywords go stagnant, you’re just spinning your wheels.

There’s a difference between a vendor and a partner. A vendor offers products and services to help their customers improve a component of their business. A partner shares in the mentality and makes the goals of both companies unified. That’s what Cardinale Automotive Group found in KPA Internet Marketing: a true partner relationship.

In this case study, we get to see exactly what has happened in the year that we have worked together. Check out the PDF here.

There’s a certain challenge when it comes to SEO that makes it challenging for vendors to do it right. Normally, there’s a period of time required to achieve results, making it necessary for car dealers to be patient when judging the efforts of their search engine optimization partners. For this reason, KPA has always used contracts as a commitment by both our company and the dealership to see the efforts through to the end and make a real impact on traffic, leads, and sales.

When we were selected to participate as the chosen SEO partner for Dealers United in April, there was a certain level of trepidation surrounding it. We had never done a month-to-month deal for SEO and we’ve had challenges in the past communicating to dealers that it’s not like PPC. With pay-per-click, you pay your money and it turns on. You stop paying and it turns off. With SEO, you pay your money and it takes time for the results to appear, but conversely the effects can also last well-beyond the final payment made by a dealer to their SEO partner.

I’ve always looked at it as the difference between renting a home and buying a home.

We were pleased to find that the automotive industry has really started understanding the time requirements for SEO. Since April, our retention rate for Dealers United SEO clients has been incredible, far beyond what we would have anticipated. They were savvy (as the majority of Dealers United dealers are) and have given us the time necessary to make it happen. Now, they’re getting the amazing results.

The SEO deal, which Dealers United is running for the rest of this week, is similar in that it includes SEO, is a month-to-month investment, and requires some patience. In many ways, this deal is much better than the initial SEO deal because it empowers us to use the full scope of the KPA Connect platform which was designed specifically with search and social in mind combined with best practices for lead-generation.

If you are not absolutely ecstatic with your current website, you should strongly consider taking advantage of the Dealers United website deal for August. KPA has never and will never be able to offer anything like again – building websites and optimizing them on a month-to-month agreement is something that only Dealers United’s clout can deliver. We’re extremely excited about the new clients we’ve been able to get and we’re pumped to see who takes advantage of the deal during this, the final week.

Here’s a demonstration from the man himself, Matthew Funk.

Thousands of dealers around the country received notification yesterday through Webmaster Tools of “unnatural links” to their site. In the past, this would have been an awful thing, but as Google’s Matt Cutts explains, there’s no need to panic. If you aren’t doing anything wrong, you have nothing to fear:

If you received a message yesterday about unnatural links to your site, don’t panic. In the past, these messages were sent when we took action on a site as a whole. Yesterday, we took another step towards more transparency and began sending messages when we distrust some individual links to a site. While it’s possible for this to indicate potential spammy activity by the site, it can also have innocent reasons. For example, we may take this kind of targeted action to distrust hacked links pointing to an innocent site. The innocent site will get the message as we move towards more transparency, but it’s not necessarily something that you automatically need to worry about.

If we’ve taken more severe action on your site, you’ll likely notice a drop in search traffic, which you can see in the “Search queries” feature Webmaster Tools for example. As always, if you believe you have been affected by a manual spam action and your site no longer violates the Webmaster Guidelines, go ahead and file a reconsideration request. It’ll take some time for us to process the request, but you will receive a followup message confirming when we’ve processed it.

Having your business rank at the top of the SERPs for ‘Local Used Cars’ may prove to be more competitive than you may have realized in the beginning, and Penguin could have made it even more difficult for you. Paid search ads are the best way to stay at the top of the organic listings when Google rolls out a major algo change.

They don’t count for or against the SEO you are doing to improve your site and you can send traffic to any relevant page you’ve created. AdWords was uniquely designed to be a self-serve system from the beginning. It can be as high or low maintenance as you need it to be. You can set any minimum spend that fits your budget and choose any keywords you want to appear for (like ‘car’ if you want to test that keyword’s potential, although it is not recommended going after such vague short tail keywords).

For many SEOs, paid search is untouched territory and they like to keep it that way. But really – paid search can make or break your business. So how do you go about utilizing it to its full potential?

Simply Business understands that not all businesses have experience in PPC, so they have partnered with a paid search agency to shine some light on how to start your own AdWords advertising campaign and relieve some of the tension that surrounds it.

Click on graphic to see hand-picked industry information, like how to calculate your max bid or what different match types mean to paid search.

Click image to open interactive version.

(Photo credit: Aray Chen)

We have been extremely pleased by the Google Penguin update so far. It has shown to be exceptionally productive for us, allowing our principles of quality over quantity to shine and helping our clients to rise to the top based as much on their competitors falling as with actions on our part in the last month.

There is, apparently, a negative that can be associated with the update. In this case study below, one site was tanked based upon the efforts of a negative SEO campaign. The results have not been independently confirmed, but they are in line with what we believe is the reality, that Google will penalize sites that appear to be over-optimizing even if it’s not them doing the work. Negative SEO may be a reality in the automotive industry as we are localized just like the case study.

Kudos to Tasty Placement for putting this together as well for having one of the best names we’ve seen in the search marketing arena.

If you have any concerns or believe that your site rankings have been attacked, please let us know. We’ll see if there is any remedy.

Car dealers are in a good position. The industry is one that, because of the localization of the searches, does not require a tremendous amount of SEO that other nationwide distribution industries need. It’s not that the SEO is easier; in many ways automotive is the most challenging form of SEO out there because of the competition level on a local scale. It’s just that nobody needed to be so aggressive that they were heavily penalized by the Google Penguin update.

That’s not to say that some weren’t hurt. Many were. I know because I saw many of our rankings go up as a result of the update, which means that some dealers were dropping. This graphic looks at the basic keys of dealing in the next generation of Google optimization. Don’t fear the penguin. Embrace it.

Click to enlarge.

Related articles

• SEO Crisis Management for Websites Affected by Google Penguin (soshable.com)
• The Three Keys to Automotive SEO Under Penguin (topdealerseo.com)