Category: SEO

 

Google recently announced that starting around January 10, 2017 they will begin to filtrate and discount the organic search visibility of mobile website versions that use “intrusive” pop-up windows. They describe the three main offenses they’ll be gunning for in the new year as follows:

 

– Showing a pop-up that covers the main content, either immediately after users navigate to a landing page from the search results, or while they are looking through the page.

 

– Displaying a standalone interstitial that users have to dismiss before accessing the main content.

 

– Using a layout where the above-the-fold portion of the page appears similar to a standalone interstitial, but the original content falls in line underneath the fold.

 

Google Webmaster Trends Analyst, John Mueller, recently confirmed via Twitter that the penalty will only apply to a user’s initial landing page – meaning if an intrusive pop-up sullies the experience on the page on which a user lands directly from search results, the algorithm may take issue. Interstitials that fire from one page to the next after a user has already arrived on the website will not be taken into consideration.

 

One word to the wise would be to keep an eye on your top landing pages via analytics every month and make sure all of your most popular real estate remains as user-friendly as possible.

 

As with most changes the search engine giant makes, the end result aims to provide a better experience for those using their products. If you’ve spent any time browsing the web on your phone over the last five years you’re well aware of how absolutely aggravating pop-ups can be on mobile. As they often do, Google is trying to improve the gold usability standard.

 

The goal here is to reward websites that implement a non-intrusive interstitial strategy with better rankings, while simultaneously protecting Google’s market share by ensuring the quality of their query results.

 

How Dealer.com Website clients should interpret this news.

If you’re using an excessive number of pop-ups on your local dealership website, start determining which ones are vital to your business and which you can scale back – especially on the mobile version.

 

The most frequently asked question I’ve received from clients regarding this announcement has been “Does that mean I have to get rid of my chat tool?” The answer is no; you don’t have to get rid of your chat tool. A chat box on mobile is a pop-up with a purpose. It adds value to the site, improves user experience, and isn’t the type of window this algorithmic update is seeking to penalize.

 

Excessive pop-ups are never a good idea, regardless of device. This latest announcement from Google, however, applies only to mobile devices, and strives to remove an element of poor user experience. It also applies only to the first page a user lands on from search results, and not from across their site visit as a whole. Be confident, however, and keep those chat tools activated. They’re an important piece to many car dealership websites, and Google’s algorithm is sophisticated enough in 2017 to recognize that.

 

If you have any questions, please leave them as a comment below. You can also learn more from the following resources:

 

• Google warns it will crack down on “intrusive interstitials” in January
• Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Helping users easily access content on mobile
• Google will start penalizing mobile pop-ups: Here’s what to do

 

Dave Pye is the director of digital marketing at Dealer.com

 

 

Everything I cook requires multiple ingredients, no matter how short the recipe. It’s the marriage of many items that makes the end result so tasty. Similarly, vehicles operate via the same principle. Various parts and fluids must be present and working together for optimal performance.
The key elements needed for both the mechanical upkeep of a car and the culinary command of a kitchen are therefore similar: the regular collaboration of a variety of essential ingredients. Ongoing maintenance and attention to detail is also critical. For the soup to taste delicious and the engine to purr we have to keep the knives sharp and the oil topped off. The point is, a car dealership’s digital strategy also requires multiple online marketing channels, coupled with a large helping of ongoing TLC, in order to perform at its peak. And in no area is this more true than with search engine visibility. Search success rests with a combined SEO and SEM strategy.

Let’s look at how you can get your SEO and SEM working together to cast a wider net over your local target market. You may be reviewing your marketing budget and asking yourself a few questions:

A. Should your dealership use an automotive SEO service?

B. Should we only use SEM/PPC?

C. Will our PPC efforts eat up our organic visibility – or vice versa?

There’s not really an easy way to answer this. Each channel has its own pros and cons and each dealership its own set of challenges and business goals. When paid and organic begin working together as part of a total holistic strategy for digital visibility, however, your local competition better watch out.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

In its simplest form, SEO is a process of on/off site strategies and tactics used to increase the organic visibility of a website or page for a specific group of keywords.

SEO takes time, sort of like the 24 Hours of the famous Le Mans race. Teams have to prepare, organize, research, test, and build, starting long before the competition takes place. Once in a while, rules and regulations change just like an update to Google’s algorithm, which may prolong the preparation even further.

With content we must wait for search engines (Google, Yahoo, and Bing) to crawl a site, then populate results based upon a user’s search query and intent. Unlike Le Mans, this race never ends. You have to be in it for the long haul, and I don’t mean 3-6 months. You’re barely over the starting line at that point.

SEM (Search Engine Marketing)

In short, SEM is a way of promoting a website within search engine results pages (SERPs) by “paying to play”. Like SEO, SEM relies on targeted keyword phrases to populate results. These PPC (Pay Per Click) ads typically sit at the top or right-hand side of a SERP and their prominence depends on various factors including bid amount, daily budgets, and landing page relevance.

In automotive terms, SEM is less like a test of endurance and more like an adrenaline-fueled drag race. A car pulls up to the starting line, the light tree counts down, then in a few seconds the race is over and results are displayed. If SEO is the tortoise in this competition, then SEM is definitely the hare.

Let’s take a look at how the reptile and the rodent can work together (we know rabbits aren’t rodents but it just sounds better than “the reptile and the lagomorph”). As illustrated below, we performed a search for “cars for sale vegas”. Inside the red boxes are the ads, each demarcated with a little green “Ad” indicator. The green box represents the organic listings.
Simply put, leveraging both marketing channels allows for more exposure in the SERPs. On the SEO side, OEM guidelines can be strict, especially with on-site content and geo-targets. It’s also a best practice to limit your on-site geo-targets to only the most relevant (in terms of proximity, population, brand awareness, etc.) so as not to dilute the potential of your site to rank well for the most mission-critical areas.

SEM provides a way to expand reach into additional marketplaces, or target other makes and models, for which your site may be at an organic disadvantage. Paid advertising can also complement organic search in other ways. Remember when Google reduced its local pack listings to three positions? Many dealerships used SEM to supplement traffic they lost as a result.
Then there’s the “speed to market” which SEM enables. SEO efforts may take months to percolate. Do you have a used vehicle on the lot which you don’t normally carry? Is there a new model available you want to get eyeballs in front of right away? Why not bid on these terms (SEM) while optimizing the site for them over time (SEO)? Once the organic visibility is attained you may decide it’s time to lower those bids as the traffic has started arriving via a different channel. Another example of the two mediums working together.

Regardless of the channel, the overall goal is always going to be landing visitors on a relevant page that provides answers to their questions or information they’re seeking. As automotive digital marketers, we have only a small window (a few seconds) of opportunity to gain visitors’ trust. Otherwise, they’ll bounce off the site and take their business elsewhere, never to be seen again.

More strategic decisions.

SEO and SEM is often a balancing act. Say you’re bidding on your dealership’s name, paying to get your brand top placement on SERPs. While your monthly SEM spend is increasing, your dealership’s visibility on search engines is improving. Shoppers are more likely to reach the pages you’re promoting through your paid search efforts than through organic search results. This is great news, except that your organic search efforts are bringing in less traffic because shoppers are seeing your paid search ad way before they’re seeing your search listing due simply to SERP layouts.

So, you’ve got to ask yourself frequently if the paid search ads are worth it? Are you getting the most bang for your buck? In this example, when evaluating metrics, look for organic dips in search terms relating to your business name. How much are you spending on that? Are other dealerships also showing in the results? When users specifically search for a business by name, their intent is to visit that business’s site. If you stop bidding on your dealership name, you’ll see organic traffic start to rebound. This doesn’t happen in every case, but this balancing act and monitoring of it is something to consider when evaluating metrics and looking at adjusting SEO or SEM investment.

Another SEO and SEM strategy is to review what ads already populate for keywords under consideration. For example, someone is looking for a flight to Italy. Naturally, the search term could be “flights to Italy.” Results will look similar to this:
We can quickly see domination from 1800FlyEurope.com. Three out of four results reference “Cheap Flights” which most likely have a high click-through rate. Google trusts the top ads. How can that impact organic? What’s the strategy? Hold on, we’re getting there.

Let’s now take a look at organic rankings for the same term:

Kayak is ranking number one with “Cheap Flights to Italy” and 1800FlyEurope.com doesn’t even show up on page one. At least not at time. What does this mean? Kayak is pouncing on the opportunity to bring continuity to their paid (SEM) and organic (SEO) results in the form of high SERP placement. 1800FlyEurope.com has an opportunity to work the SERPs this way, too.

In the same vein, car dealerships can review what’s working from the PPC side, making sure to create the same search experience for their organic strategy. With multiple search results you can protect your position in very competitive territory.
In a nutshell, SEO and SEM shouldn’t be viewed as two marketing strategies operating independently of one another. Instead, view them as two similar traffic-driving tools working toward one goal: optimizing your dealership’s visibility on search engines by capturing as much SERP real estate as possible. The whole, here, is surely greater than the sum of its parts. Be it cars, dishes, or digital marketing.

Chris Nichols is an SEO Manager at Dealer.com

In a recent Dealer.com Premium SEO Performance Study, we looked at the average lift in KPI’s for our Premium SEO package and found, on average, dealer websites captured 49% more website visits, 57% more organic visits, 53% more form submissions and 33% more VDP views.

A decade ago, SEO (Search Engine Optimization) was a buzzword in the automotive industry; a concept which was hard to grasp and that few understood. Over the years, however, most businesses have modified their marketing strategy to include some form of organic SEO. As a result, website providers and advertising agencies developed and expanded their SEO offerings, knowing that one size doesn’t fit all.

Over the last half-decade especially, the search engines have unleashed, what seems like, an infinite amount of updates: changes to the algorithm, tweaks to the search results page layout, different colored text for ads and a variety of new calls-to-action. This begs the question: with so many changes, rapidly increasing mobile adoption, and Google giving us such refined results, is SEO still necessary?

The Evolution of the SERP (Search Engine Results Page)

To answer this question, we need to examine the evolution of the SERP and how it affects the organic listings. Below is a search for ‘Chrysler Lakewood’ made on Google in 2013:

Quite the contrast from the same search in 2016:

There are a number of differences in the way ads and local (now called Google My Business) listings display. The ads are no longer clearly separated within a beige box, and an additional local listing is now shown. The local listings are also more robust. Each includes a direct link to the website and a call-to-action to receive directions. With the map now moved out of the right-side column and placed below the ads, there is noticeably less real estate for the organic listings.

Let’s examine the changes of the Google SERP as it displays for mobile. Here are searches made on a mobile device over a shorter period of six months:

One of the tasks of an SEO provider should be to stay current with the updates search engines have been making, and then develop a strategy accordingly. The changes over just the last months have been remarkable. For example, paid ads now include a click-to-call option and have changed color from yellow to green. Perhaps the most interesting aspect is that the ads now look more like organic listings.

Additional recent SERP changes include:

– Expanded Text Ads, which are taking up more real estate on the page.

– Ads that now include a variety of modifiers, including click-to­-call and a set of links that allow navigation to other areas of the site right from the ad – not unlike an organic listing.

– In a desktop search, the removal of the right-side ads entirely and additional ads that often push organic listings further down the SERP.

Google Has Always Focused on the User

Google, and other search engines, make updates based on extensive testing. They experiment with different iterations, prove a concept and then roll out the best performer. Yes, the ads now look more like organic listings – perhaps in an attempt to increase click-through rates on the paid side. They are, however, more user-friendly and provide shoppers with a clear path to conversion.

The Changing Search Landscape

Below is a snapshot of a dealer client’s organic site visits over the last 13 months (light blue) and PPC (paid search) visits for the same timeframe (dark blue). These two graphs reflect mobile usage only:

For this site, we’re seeing a decrease in organic search and a lift in pay-per-click traffic. Of course, correlation does not necessarily equal causation. Trends like this involve diving into the data, and analyzing and being aware of what is happening in the industry. Here we are seeing the site’s organic search engine visibility improving while the advertising budget remains the same. The expansion of mobile ads, and the addition of more call-to-action options, is increasing the advertising traffic and decreasing the organic traffic.

To put it another way, recent changes see mobile shoppers finding what they’re looking for (directions, click-to-call, a set of links that allow them to access the most visited pages on the site, etc.) within the mobile ads. These paid ads are displayed prominently at the top of mobile page versions, while the organic listings have been pushed (ever so slightly) a little further down the page.

So, Do We Still Need SEO?

YES; you need SEO now more than ever!

With less organic real estate, it’s even more important to have experienced SEO professionals working for your dealership to maximize your business’s visibility across every search engine. They should be able to:

– Recognize key searches that are bringing traffic to your website from a search engine.

– Find ‘low hanging fruit’: less competitive phrases that searchers frequently click on to access the site.

– Adapt their strategy quickly, because they need to stay at the forefront of the search industry.

Ideally, they would be a part of a larger SEO team that actively collects data, tests strategies, and reports results. A bigger team means more eyeballs on the search engine landscape and more minds to share ideas. A successful SEO and PPC strategy, for example, provided the aforementioned site with more total search engine traffic over the previous year. This didn’t occur as a result of Google’s mobile SERP changes alone.

An SEO Strategy Should Be Focused on Local and Mobile SEO

“Where are the closest restaurants to me?” “Find me the nearest Honda service center.” Searches including phrases like ‘nearby’ or ‘near me’ have surged; usage has multiplied over 30 times during the last four years. Searchers now talk to search engines like they’re asking for a recommendation from a close friend. Local (Google My Business) results often provide a large percentage of organic traffic to a site. With a good SEO strategy, the placement of a local listing can improve, just like an organic listing.

The Advantage of Having SEO, SEM, and Website Services with the Same Provider

Housing all facilitators of your search strategy under one roof allows each piece of it to communicate with the other. There are numerous benefits to a combined SEO and SEM strategy. An SEM analyst can test and report a high-converting piece of ad copy, which, in turn, can be incorporated into an organic listing. Conversely, SEO can aid the SEM analyst’s efforts by increasing the relevancy of the ad through targeted on-site content. If you use the same digital provider for your dealership website, your SEM and SEO representatives are experts within the platform and know how to increase its performance on search engines.

Despite the ever-changing search landscape, all digital strategies have to include SEO – whether you refer to it as “organic search engine optimization”, “local SEO”, or an “ongoing content strategy”. The practice is far from dead. It’s a continually evolving craft, subject to myriad changes that happen at a fairly regular cadence (algorithms, SERPs, mobile adoption). It’s been this way since the late ‘90s. If you and your provider adapt accordingly, the outcome will be competitive local and natural digital visibility.

We’d love to hear what you think! Please leave any questions or feedback in the comments below – and keep on creating quality content aimed at customers.

Jessica Cronin is a senior search strategist at Dealer.com

Gone are the days of stuffing websites chock-full of keyword-rich content to gain top search engine rankings. No more simple replication of webpages and the swapping of geographical targets within content to “expand” search visibility (e.g. doorway pages).

In 2015, Google is more sophisticated than ever. Its ranking algorithm focuses heavily on content relevance and user experience. When building landing pages from a car dealer SEO perspective, it’s important to design them for human users and not solely for Google’s algorithm. When you create high quality, engaging, and helpful content, Google is likely to perceive it as a resource and reward it with higher rankings.

Below is an example of a page that was built by a senior search analyst for a Dealer.com car dealer SEO client looking to reach relevant shoppers interested in the rare Toyota Tundra XSP-X. The orange highlights represent the top 10 elements that make this page pop to search engines and a highly effective driver of relevant traffic:

1. A short, keyword-targeted page URL.

2. Relevant meta data (title and description) that is short, localized & keyword targeted.

3. A standout title clearly describing what the page is about.

4. Unique, textual content written for a shopper, not a search engine bot, that exists above the fold.

5. Links to relevant pages for shoppers looking for more information, in this case, inventory and specials pages.

6. A form above the fold that allows shoppers to easily set up a test drive, thus driving conversions.

7. High quality, relevant photos that draw shoppers’ attention and entices them to submit a lead for more information.

8. Additional details/content to highlight the hot features included.

9. More high quality images that showcase the vehicle.

10. Another link directing the user to inventory & vehicle details pages.

The success of this page has been staggering. It ranks first nationally on Google for keywords such as “tundra xsp-x”, “toyota xsp-x”, and it does so without a geotarget. The dealership now leads the industry in Toyota Tundra XSP-X sales across the country. Toyota corporate was so impressed that it flew reps to the dealership’s location for an official XSP-X launch event.

It is critical to approach SEO from a quality content perspective and forget about outdated strategies designed to fool Google’s algorithm. Remember: the best custom pages are built for users, not search engines, and focus on creating a truly helpful resource for car shoppers.

About the Author: Pete Bruhn is the Associate Product Manager, SEO & Managed Services at Dealer.com. He has 10 years of experience in the SEO and search marketing industry, six while working at Dealer.com. He can be reached via email at pete.bruhn@dealer.com and on Google+ at google.com/+PeteBruhn.

Long-time Dealer.com website partner Brown Automotive Group adopted Dealer.com Managed Services to optimize its stores’ visibility, manage more effective campaigns, and to allow the group to focus more on advancing its digital strategy. The results were significant.

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