Tag: SEM

3 Ways Social Media Can Help Your Dealership Increase Search Ranking

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Dealer.com SEO

It’s not news that social media and SEO are invaluable to every dealership’s marketing strategy today. SEO has long been a critical element of search engine visibility, while social media, newer to the marketing scene, has become essential to a holistic digital strategy.

Perhaps what gets lost or continues to go unrecognized, however, is the increasingly important relationship between car dealer SEO and social media, how good content reaches far beyond social platforms, and that dealers need to think about an SEO and social strategy as one and the same.

While display and paid search advertising are designed to grab attention, SEO and social media, at least in this context, support brand visibility across traditional search engines and the social media platforms consumers are increasingly using to search for vehicles and dealerships.

Since it’s becoming more and more clear that one practice cannot succeed without the other, here are three ways a strong social media presence comprising high quality and frequently updated content that is informed by analytics can help your dealership’s search engine rankings improve.

1. Target a specific audience.

Social media has become more than just general community interaction.  Platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, even YouTube allow dealers to target potential car buyers based on demographics, keywords and geographical location. Just like local SEO strategy, social posts should target a highly specific set of qualified, in-market shoppers in your region.

It’s not enough to create content, hit the post or tweet button, and hope the right people will see the message. If you want to reach the right shoppers and continue to build a following, make sure you’re poring over your social data to determine the appropriate targeting strategy.

2. Create relevant content.

Here’s an exercise: do a Google search for one of your favorite major brands and chances are its Facebook page, for example, ranks somewhere not too far from the top organic listing. That’s because high-quality, relevant content has tremendous SEO value.

What’s high-quality, relevant content? It’s engaging, informative posts, tweets, articles, captioned photos, and videos that target a specific audience.

But don’t stop there. Great social media content also means linking to supporting webpages and writing using keywords and geographic terms that relate to your business. When that content also links to your dealership’s website, it may, for example, reinforce your onsite advertising efforts and integrate with your SEO strategy to help improve search engine results page (SERP) ranking.

And one more thing. Use #hashtags when relevant. While they don’t directly affect SEO ranking, timely hashtags tactically increase awareness and engagement of your social content. They’re both content filtering tools and, sometimes, a chance to expand your brand reach by joining onto something trending on the internet that might be useful to your marketing efforts.

3. Integrate your advertising efforts.

Create content that promotes your dealership’s advertising strategy such as new vehicle launches, dealership events, comparison pages, and sales promotions. This content should always link shoppers to the website where the marketing initiatives are well detailed.

Speaking of links, while those from social posts are considered “no follow,” meaning they don’t directly influence SEO, they can still influence relevancy on SERPs. Search engines like active websites, those that are being clicked on and engaged with. The volume of increased links shared through social content boosts social signals, which positively impacts long-term search visibility and ranking. Links to your website in social content won’t push SEO value directly, but Google will notice this social-originated traffic. Exponential impact can come from outside user engagement and can lead to authoritative backlinks.

The search and social platforms we once thought as islands are now clearly part of one big digital ecosystem. The trick is to use each one effectively and with strategy interconnection so as to ensure you’re reaching as much of your target audience as possible without burning out on too much content generation. Stick to relevant content creation, one with applicable keywords, hashtags, and links, post frequently, and your dealership will be “buying” up more and more of that first SERP page real estate.

Bobby Bailey is the manager, Managed Social and Chris Nichols is the manager, SEO at Dealer.com

How to Uncover Impactful Automotive Keywords Using Google’s Search Console

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Dealer.com SEO

Marketers, Internet managers, SEO analysts, and anyone else with an interest in website search visibility enjoyed full access to organic keyword referral data when it was available.

Before 2013, webmasters could log into Google Analytics to reveal every keyword that drove traffic to a site. Seeing the actual keywords, pages visitors landed on, and all the metrics about that page allowed for easy decision making. For SEO professionals particularly, it was the golden age of relevant keyword data.

In the fall of 2013, however, Google switched to its Secure Search, encrypting all searches and effectively cutting off the keyword data that website owners had come to rely on over the years.

So, what is a webmaster to do without organic keyword referral data? The good news is that there are still methods to glean some of this information once critical to car dealer SEO efforts. The best way to uncover effective keywords is to use the Search Analytics report found in the Search Console (formerly Google Webmaster Tools). Don’t be intimidated by the Search Console; it might look imposing at first, but it’s much easier to use than you think. Along the top you can select as many or as little data sets as you choose.

*Note: 28 days is the default date range. Order is based on number of clicks. These settings can be changed to fit your criteria.

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To help you make sense of Search Analytics, let’s define some of the terms as they pertain to the report:

Queries – This is one of the last places Google allows webmasters to view the keywords users are typing in to search for a website. It’s limited in scope, but can help make strategic decisions. This section of the report allows you to refine queries by a given word and/or term. For instance, if you want to view how terms relating to used cars are performing simply open the filter and type “used.”

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Impressions – Impressions are the number times a site has been shown to searchers.

Clicks – The number of people who have clicked on your site based on the search term used.

Click-Through Rate (CTR) – The amount of clicks divided by the number of impressions. For example, if there were 100 impressions and 25 clicks your CTR would be 25%.

Average Position – A calculation based on the number of search impressions and the ranking positions on a search engine. In one search a site could be at position five and in the next at position one, giving us an average position of three.

For details around a single phrase, simply click on the term “opening data,” which includes a line graph for the given time period.

Clarification of terms within the Search Analytics report is helpful, you say, but what should you do next? Here’s how to start:

Set the queries report 90-days out and export everything to a spreadsheet like Excel. Adding a filter to the top row will allow for easier sorting given there might be over 1,000 terms.

Separate terms by average position. Look at those sitting in positions 4-10 and again from 11-15. Those hovering at the top of page two may not take a ton of effort to push into the top 10 (page 1). Consider these low-hanging fruit.

Review the keywords, put them into groups, and check the estimated monthly search volume.

Run those in the 4-10 positions the same way. From here, assemble a plan of attack based on user data.

While it might take some familiarization, deciphering the data in Google’s Search Analytics report (it’s free, by the way) can be very beneficial to your dealership. It’ll help your business create a content strategy based on actual users’ searches, and not on the sort of educated assumptions made necessary since the demise of organic keyword referral data.

Chris Nichols is manager, SEO at Dealer.com

How to Use Google’s New Micro-Moment Automotive Study to Inform Your Digital Strategy

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Google recently adapted its highly influential Zero Moment of Truth concept to the automotive industry, calling the decision-making, car-buying journey a series of micro moments, or key behaviors that led, or didn’t lead, to a purchase.

In their research, Google determined five micro moments where car shoppers asked themselves:

­– Which car is best?

– Is it right for me?

– Can I afford it?

– Where should I buy it?

– Am I getting a deal?

For decades, savvy auto retailers and industry vendors have almost intrinsically known that shoppers are asking themselves these questions at pivotal moments along the car-buying process. Google’s study reinforces the importance of these critical moments with consumer data.

But what the industry is now adapting to a new sales strategy, one that embraces shoppers’ desire to do more of the shopping process online, and is backed by groundbreaking technology to help customers get the best possible answers to their most important questions.

Here’s how to put Google’s five key micro moments into the context of building a strategy using digital marketing and digital retailing to generate automobile leads:

1. Advertise where car buyers perform research.

Whether it’s a paid search or audience targeting campaign, the Google micro-moment study reminds us that strategic digital advertising, a service that Dealer.com offers as a sort of personal automotive advertising agency for your dealership, can help you capture the attention of shoppers who are in the information-gathering phase of the car-buying process.

2. Create content on your website that compares your models to those of key competitors.

Shoppers are looking for the right information to help them reach a buying decision. And we know that as research and decision-making has moved online, the days of shoppers having to visit multiple dealers are long behind us. If your brand and models are cross-shopped, create video and write blog content on your website and for social media that provides side-by-side comparison and analysis to tell the story of why your car is right for car buyers.

3. Use Digital Retailing tools.

Answering the question of affordability begins with payment (italicized because you’ll read that word a lot in the next sentence). The payment affordability experience should begin on your website with real finance payments and leases, the ability to search by payment, and self-pencil alternative down payments, terms, trade values and credit tiers.

4. Be transparent online and in every step of the selling process.

Digital Retailing allows you to create a unique car buying experience for shoppers that choose to save time by doing some of the work online. Not everyone will want to leverage these transactions tools – especially since as many as 43 percent of buyers see the dealership as a place to learn.

But by creating a transparent shopping and buying experience, your nurturing trust, establishing true partnership with your customers, and making great leaps into the future of car buying and selling.

5. Use marketing campaigns to drive awareness and visibility into your car-buying process.

Now that you offer an experience that differentiates your business, let it. From retargeting, to updating your brand-oriented display advertising, to slideshows, to social media, even a YouTube channel – the sky’s the limit on how to disseminate the message that your business is equipped to meet, and exceed, shopper expectations.

While other dealerships may continue to implement an outdated sales model, you can market your dealership by selling your car-buying experience, and value, and orienting your business around time savings, transparency, and convenience.

Dealers will never make every deal, or sell every opportunity. But by taking key industry research like the Google Micro-Moment Automotive Study and aligning your strategy with those learnings, you are establishing your business to continue to thrive in this digital age.

Are you using Google’s Micro-Moment Automotive Study to help guide your digital strategy? Comment below to let us know.

 

Patrick Wyld is an enterprise performance manager at Dealer.com